( 






INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH 
HISTORIANS 



'*&&&>■ 



AN INTRODUCTION TO THE 
ENGLISH HISTORIANS 



BY 



CHARLES A. BEARD, Ph.D. 

LECTURER IN HISTORY AND POLITICAL SCIENCE 
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 



Nefo gorfc 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

1906 

All rights reserved 



OCT 9 1906 

GLASS CL/KXo. M«l 
COPY 8 






Copyright, 1906, 
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1906. 



Nortoooti -IPrfSS 

J. S. Cushing & Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. 

Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 



PREFATORY NOTE 

A college course in English history must introduce the 
student to a number of great authorities on special periods and 
topics. It is not enough that these authorities should be casually 
read ; they should be studied as carefully as a case-book in law, 
and then critically considered in the classroom. It is also 
necessary that all the students should do this special reading at 
the time when the particular topic is reached in the text-book 
or lectures. 

The teacher is therefore confronted with the problem of 
controlling; this additional reading, and of satisfying himself 
that it is well done by all the students. If he has large classes, 
he constantly meets the complaint that the students have not 
been able to secure the required book at the proper time, and 
concerted class work is thereby destroyed. If he seeks to avoid 
this difficulty by requiring the students to hand in notes, he not 
only makes class discussion impossible, but he doubtless dis- 
covers that a great deal of the note-taking is perfunctory, and 
that some have copied from the more industrious. 

Finding my own experience confirmed by that of many other 
teachers of English history, I venture to issue this volume of 
readings as an attempt at a partial solution of the problem 
stated above. I am conscious of the difficulties accompanying 
such an enterprise, and realize fully the great and legitimate 
divergence of opinion that teachers will have in selecting assign- 
ments for their students. It seems, however, that all the topics 
included in this collection are of first-rate importance, and that 
the authorities represented are those worthy of careful study. 
That there are hundreds of equally important selections and 
other writers on English history of quite as high rank, there can 






VI 



Preface 



be no doubt ; but every undertaking has its limitations. More- 
over, the problem of proportion is a difficult one ; but I believe 
many excellent arguments might be advanced for devoting one 
half the book to the last three centuries of English history. 

Such a collection as this does not obviate the necessity of 
recourse to the authorities themselves ; it only enables the 
teacher to compel a thorough study of minimum requirements. 
Indeed, the extracts given here should stimulate an interest 
in the great historians and lead the student further afield. 
All the books quoted below should be in the library of every 
college and even secondary school. 

In addition to introducing the student to many English histo- 
rians, these readings may serve as the basis for critical opera- 
tions of great disciplinary value. By having the students turn 
to the original volumes from which these extracts are taken and 
specially examine the foot-notes and citations of evidence, an 
understanding of the constructive methods of the various authors 
may be developed. This analysis of secondary authorities 
should prove as useful in training the critical faculties as an 
attempt to build up a narrative from the sources. It might 
prove more useful, since most college students in after life will 
do far more reading than research. The art of scholarly appre- 
ciation is certainly a desirable permanent possession. 

To further facilitate critical operations, short bibliographies 
have been added, especially to those extracts which need ampli- 
fication or contain controverted views. The selections are 
reproduced exactly as they stand in the works from which they 
are taken ; no attempt has been made to modify or suppress the 
opinions of the respective authors. No foot-notes are added, 
for they are not usually read by the college student. The critical 
work must be done by the teacher and the students themselves 
if it is to be of any real value. * The bibliographies merely indi- 
cate some of the important materials to which they may turn 
for divergent views. This work may be helpfully supplemented 
by constant reference to the source books by Kendall, Colby, 
Lee, Stubbs, Gee and Hardy, Prothero, Gardiner, Robertson, 



Preface 



vn 



and Adams and Stephens, which are fortunately known to most 
college teachers and should be in every teaching library. 

I am greatly indebted to the authors and publishers who have 
generously allowed me to make these selections, and due 
acknowledgment is made with each extract. I am also under 
obligations to several- teachers of English history, whose names 
I will not associate with an undertaking so experimental in 
character. 

CHARLES A. BEARD. 

Columbia University, 
September, 1906. 



CONTENTS 

PART I 
THE FOUNDATIONS OF ENGLAND 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. Two Theories of the Anglo-Saxon Conquest i 

II. Old Britain and the Anglo-Saxon Conquest . , . . 6 

III. Adoption of Christianity and Unification of England . 12 

IV. Alfred the Great and English Learning .... 30 
V. The Reign of Cnut 38 

VI. The Anglo-Saxon Royal Council 48 

PART II 

FEUDALISM AND NATIONALISM 

I. The Men of London and the Coronation of William the 

Conqueror 61 

II. Anglo-Norman Feudalism 73 

III. Sorts and Conditions of Men 78 

IV. Reforms in Church and State under Henry II . . 96 
V. The True Nature of Magna Carta 110 

VI. The Origin of Parliament .• 124 

VII. Growth of Parliamentary Powers 140 

PART III 

MEDIAEVAL INSTITUTIONS 

I. The Growth of an English Manor 158 

II. The Medleval Gilds 169 

III. Town Life in the Middle Ages . . . . . .185 

ix 



Contents 



CHAPTER 

IV. The Church in the Middle Ages 
V. John Wycliffe and the Church . 



PAGE 

204 
221 



PART IV 

THE TUDOR AGE 

I. The New Learning — Erasmus and More . 
II. State of Religious Opinion on the Eve of the Separa 

TION FROM RoME 

III. Parliament and the Breach with Rome . 

IV. The Maintenance of the New Establishment 
V. The Origin of the Doctrinal Revolt 

VI. The Last Days of Thomas Cranmer . 

VII. The Elizabethan Settlement in the Church 

VIII. Europe and England in the Elizabethan Age 

IX. The Growth of Puritanism .... 



231 

246 

2 55 
264 

274 

281 

295 
307 
321 



PART V 

THE STUART CONSTITUTIONAL CONFLICT 

I. Opening of the Constitutional Struggle under James I 

II. The Parliamentary Crisis of 1629 

III. Archbishop Laud and the Religious Controversy 

IV. Long Parliament and the Peaceful Revolution 
V. Charles I and his Accusers 

VI. Cromwell and Parliament 

VII. The Restoration Settlement in State and Church 

VIII. James II and the Catholic Reaction . 

IX. The Whig Revolution and Settlement 



33i 
347 
355 
364 
373 
3§i 

39i 
404 

417 



PART VI 

THE EXPANSION OF ENGLAND 
I. Motives for Colonization .... 
II. Drake and the Circumnavigation 



423 
434 



Contents xi 

CHAPTER PAGE 

III. Rise of British Dominion in India , 443 

IV. The Contest for Canada 452 

PART VII 
ENGLAND UNDER THE GEORGES 

I. Walpole and his System 466 

II. John Wesley and Methodism 478 

III. Personal Government of George III 492 

IV. The Industrial Revolution 505 

V. The Continental System 520 

PART VIII 

THE AGE OF REFORM 



I. The Old Parliamentary System 

II. The Reform Bill of 1832 . . . 

III. The Triumph of Urban Democracy 

IV. The Enfranchisement of the Rural Laborer 
V. The Cabinet System 

VI. Labor and Socialism in English Politics . 



538 

549 
566 
582 

594 
608 



PART IX 

THE EMPIRE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 

I. The Economic Foundations of Imperialism . 623 

II. The Great Indian Mutiny 638 

III. The Australian Constitution ....... 645 

INDEX 663 



PART I 

THE FOUNDATIONS OF ENGLAND 
CHAPTER I 

TWO THEORIES OF THE ANGLO-SAXON CONQUEST 

The problem of the racial elements composing English national- 
ity has received extended consideration at the hands of many 
eminent historians and ethnologists. Indeed, all older writers 
devoted excessive attention to the question of how far the course 
of English, history has been affected by Celtic, Roman, and Teu- 
tonic influences. A great many of them sharply distinguished 
the Teutons from the Romans, ascribing to the former a peculiar 
genius for personal liberty and self-government as contrasted 
with the latter. The adherents to this theory found the illustra- 
tions of their doctrines in the history of England and ignored 
the contradictions to be found everywhere in the history of 
Germany, the Teutonic country which felt the direct influence 
of Rome less than did France or England. According to this 
view, the history of England begins with the story of independent 
warriors who invaded Britain, swept away the elements of Celtic 
and Roman culture, and founded a nation of freemen governing 
themselves through local and national popular assemblies. To 
be sure, England afterward suffered from feudalism and despotism, 
but the spirit of liberty inherent in the people finally triumphed 
over these reactionary forces. 

Now this entire theory has been given an importance which its 
intrinsic worth does not justify, especially in view of the present 
tendency among scientists to minimize the influence of race as 
the determining factor in the shaping of institutions. Moreover 

B I 



1 English Historians 

the theory, which was largely the outcome of reading democratic 
ideas of the nineteenth century into very scanty and fragmentary 
evidences, has been attacked during the last two decades with 
great energy and erudition. On the other hand, there has appeared 
an opposing view that the bulk of the English population is Celtic, 
and that Romano- Celtic institutions persisted in spite of the Anglo- 
Saxon conquest. 

This controversy has not led to any very definite results, and 
the subjects of discussion have lost whatever moral value they 
were once supposed to have had, for no one now believes that 
the form of land tenure in Anglo-Saxon times, for example, throws 
any light at all on the present English land problem. It might 
as well be admitted that we can never know the numerical pro- 
portion of Celts and Teutons in the English nation, for there are 
no data on which to base a conclusion. While there is still a 
tendency to hold that the majority were Teutons, tfyere is also 
a tendency to reject the theory that these Teutons had any par- 
ticular genius for political liberty or any peculiar institutions 
which marked them off from other peoples in a primitive stage 
of culture. The best statement of the problem as it now stands 
is in a remarkable study of early English institutions by Professor 
Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond. 

§ i. Statement of the Two Theories 1 

We are told that "in spite of all the labor that has been spent 
on the early history of England, scholars are still at variance upon 
the most fundamental of questions: the question whether that 
history began with a population of independent freemen or with 
a population of dependent serfs." Some exception maybe taken 
to this statement. No one denies that for the purposes of Eng- 
lish history slavery is a primitive institution, nOr that in the 
seventh and eighth centuries there were many slaves in England. 
On the other hand, no one will assert that we can ascertain, even 
approximately, the ratio that the number of slaves bore to the 
number of free men. Moreover, such terms as " dependent " and 

1 Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, pp. 221 ff. 



Two Theories of the Anglo-Saxon Conquest 3 

" independent" are not words that we can profitably quarrel over, 
since they are inexact and ambiguous. 

For all this, however, it may well be said that there are two 
main theories before the world. The one would trace the Eng- 
lish manor back to the Roman villa, would think of the soil of 
England as being tilled from the first mainly by men who, when 
they were not mere slaves, were coloni ascript to the land. The 
other would postulate the existence of a large number of free men 
who with their own labor tilled their own soil, of men who might 
fairly be called free "peasant proprietors," since they were far from 
rich and had few slaves or servants, and yet who were no mere 
peasants, since they habitually bore arms in the national host. 
What may be considered for the moment as a variant on this lat- 
ter doctrine would place the ownership of the soil, or of large tracts 
of the soil, not in these free peasants taken as individuals, but in 
free village communities. 

§ 2. Argument for the Second Theory 

Now we will say at once that the first of these theories we can- 
not accept if it be put forward in a general form, if it be applied 
to the whole or anything like the whole of England. Certainly 
we are not in a position to deny that in some cases a Roman villa 
having come into the hands of a Saxon chieftain, he treated the slaves 
and coloni that he found upon it in much the same way as that 
in which they had been theretofore treated, though even in such 
a case the change was in all probability momentous, since large 
commerce and all that large commerce implies had perished. 
But against the hypothesis that this was the general case, the Eng- 
lish language and uV names of our English villages are the un- 
answered protest. It seems incredible that the bulk cf the popu- 
lation should have been of Celtic blood and yet that the Celtic 
language should not merely have disappeared, but have stamped 
few traces of itself upon the speech of the conquerors. 

This we regard as an objection which goes to the root of the 
whole matter and which throws upon those who would make the 
English nation in the main a nation of Celtic bondmen, the burden 
of strictly proving their thesis. The German invaders must have 
been numerous. The Britons were no cowards. They contested 
the soil inch by inch. The struggle was long and arduous. What 
then, we must ask, became of the mass of the victors ? Surely it 
is impossible that they at once settled down as the " dependent 
serfs" of their chieftains. 



4 English Historians 

Again, though it is very likely that where we find a land of scat- 
tered steads and of isolated hamlets, there the Germanic conquerors 
have spared or have been unable to subdue the Britons or have 
adapted their own arrangements to the exterior framework that 
was provided by Celtic or Roman agriculture, still, until Meitzen 
has been refuted, we are compelled to say that our true villages, 
the nucleated villages with large "open fields," are not Celtic, are 
not Roman, but are very purely and typically German. But this 
is not all. Hereafter we shall urge some other objections. The 
doctrine in question will give no rational explanation of the state 
of things that is revealed to us by the Domesday Survey of the 
northern and eastern counties, and it will give no rational explana- 
tion of seignorial justice. This being so, we seem bound to sup- 
pose that at one time there was a large class of peasant proprie- 
tors, that is, of free men who tilled the soil that they owned, and to 
discuss the process which substitutes for peasant proprietorship the 
manorial organization. 

§ 3. Feudalism not Retrogression 

Though we cannot deal at any length with a matter which lies 
outside the realm of legal history, we ought at once to explain that 
we need not regard this change as a retrogression. There are 
indeed historians who have not yet abandoned the habit of speak- 
ing of feudalism as though it were a disease of the body politic. 
Now the word "feudalism" is and always will be an inexact term, 
and, no doubt, at various times and places there emerge phenomena 
which may with great propriety be called feudal, and which come 
of evil and make for evil. But if we use the term, and often we 
do, in a very wide sense, if we describe several centuries as feudal, 
then feudalism will appear to us as a natural and even a necessary 
stage in our history; that is to say, if we would have the England 
of the sixteenth century arise out of the England of the eighth 
without passing through a period of feudalism, we must suppose 
many immense and fundamental changes in the nature of man 
and his surroundings. 

If we use the term in this wide sense, then (the barbarian con- 
quests being given us as an unalterable fact) feudalism means 
civilization, the separation of employments, the division of labor, 
the possibility of national defence, the possibility of art, 
science, literature, and learned leisure; the cathedral, the scrip- 
torium, the library, are as truly the works of feudalism as is the 



Two Theories of the Anglo-Saxon Conquest 5 

baronial castle. When therefore we speak , as we shall have to 
speak, of forces which make for the subjection of the peasantry 
to seignorial justice and which substitute the manor with its 
villeins for the free village, we shall — so at least it seems to us — 
be speaking not of abnormal forces, not of retrogression, not of 
disease, but in the main of normal and healthy growth. Far 
from us indeed is the cheerful optimism which refuses to see that 
the process of civilization is often a cruel process; but the Eng- 
land of the eleventh century is nearer to the England of the nine- 
teenth than is the England of the seventh — nearer by just four 
hundred years. 



CHAPTER II 

OLD BRITAIN AND THE ANGLO-SAXON CONQUEST 

Among the historians who have adhered to the Teutonic theory 
of the Anglo-Saxon conquest, Dr. Stubbs stands preeminent for 
the most cautious and scholarly statement of the case. Like Green 
and others, he believed that the origins of English institutions were 
to be sought in the forests of Germany and, dismissing the old 
British and Roman periods with a few paragraphs, he devoted two 
chapters to the Germans in their continental home before taking 
up English history in Britain. His chapter on the migration and 
conquest contains the main points of his argument in the con- 
troversy, and it would be an interesting and profitable exercise 
for the student to turn to the original volume and examine the evi- 
dence upon which the conclusions rest. 

§ i. Conquest of Gaul and Britain Contrasted 1 

The fifth century saw the foundation of the Frank dominion in 
Gaul, and the first establishment of the German races in Britain. 
The former was effected in a single long reign, by the energy of 
one great ruling tribe, which had already modified its traditional 
usages, and now, by the adoption of the language and religion of 
the conquered, prepared the way for a permanent amalgamation 
with them. In this process, whilst the dominant tribe was to 
impose a new mould upon the material which Roman dominion 
had reduced to a plastic mass, it was in its turn to take forms which 
but for the pertinacious idiosyncracy of the Gallic genius, and the 
Roman training to which it had been subjected, it would never 
have taken. . . . 

The Saxons, Angles, and Jutes, although speaking the same 
language, worshipping the same gods, and using the same laws, 
had no political unity like the Franks of Clovis; they were not 

1 Stubbs, Constitutional History of England, Vol. I, pp. 63 ff. By per- 
mission of the Delegates of the Clarendon Press, Oxford. 

6 



Old Britain and the Anglo-Saxon Conquest 7 

moved by one impulse or invited by one opportunity. The con- 
quest of Britain was the result of a series of separate expeditions, 
long continued and perhaps, in point of time, continuous, but un- 
connected, and independent of one another. It was conducted 
by single chieftains, who had nothing whatever in common with 
the nations they attacked, and who were about neither to 
amalgamate with them nor to tolerate their continued existence. 
They were men, too, on whom the charm of the Roman name had 
no power, and whose institutions were more than those of the rest 
of the barbarians, free from Roman influences ; for three centuries 
after the conquest the Saxons in Germany were still a pure nation- 
ality, unconquered by the Franks, untainted by Roman manners, 
and still heathen. 

These separate expeditions had doubtless changed their char- 
acter in course of time. Beginning as mere piratical visitations 
of the coast, — such as were those of the Danes and Norsemen at a 
later period, — they had before the end of the third century called 
forth the defensive powers of Rome, and taxed the energies of 
the count of the Saxon shore. It is not until the middle of the fifth 
century that they assume the dimensions of conquest, colonization, 
migration ; and when they have attained that character, the prog- 
ress and success of the several attempts are not uniform ; each little 
state reaches greatness by its own route, and the history of its 
growth makes a mark upon its constitution. 

If the Saxons and Angles are contrasted with the Franks, still 
more are the Britons with the Gauls. Rome had laid a very strong 
hand on Gaul, and Gaul had repaid in a remarkable degree the 
cultivation of her masters. . . . Britain had been occupied by 
the Romans, but had not become Roman ; their formative and cul- 
tivating power had affected the land rather than the owners of it. 
Here, too, had been splendid cities, Christian churches, noble 
public works, and private mansions-; but whatever amount of real 
union may have existed between the two populations ended when 
the legions were withdrawn. The Britons forgot the Latin tongue ; 
their clergy lost all sympathy with the growth of religious thought ; 
the arts of war had been disused, and the arts of peace never 
thoroughly learned. The old tribal divisions, which had never 
been really extinguished by Roman rule, rose from their hiding- 
places ; and Britain was as fertile in tyrants after the Roman con- 
quest as it was before it. 

But Roman rule had disarmed and enervated the people; con- 
stant foreign invasion found them constantly unprepared, and with- 



8 English Historians 

out hope or energy for resistance. They could not utilize the 
public works or defend the cities of their masters. So Britain was 
easy to be conquered in proportion as it was Romanized. A suc- 
cession of calamities had diminished the population, already 
greatly reduced by the withdrawal of the dependents of the Ro- 
mans into Gaul; and, when once the invitation or the con- 
cessions of the British chiefs had given the invaders a standing 
ground in the island, the occupation of the eastern half at least was 
accomplished in a short time. 

§ 2. Character of the Anglo-Saxon Conquest 

The middle of the fifth century is the approved date for the 
settlement. Kent seems to have been won by a single victory; 
the kingdom of Sussex was the result of the capture of Anderida ; 
the history of Wessex is the long story of encroachments on the 
native people, who retired very gradually, but became stronger in 
resistance as they approached the mountains and the western sea, 
until a balance of forces compelled an armed peace. Mercia, the 
country of the Southern and Middle Angles, was an aggrega- 
tion of many smaller settlements, each apparently the result of 
detached Anglian expeditions. Of the formation of the Northum- 
brian and East Anglian kingdoms we have scarcely any of those 
legendary data, which, whether historical or not, serve to give 
an individuality to the others; but such traditions as have been 
preserved lead to the belief that in both cases the kingdom was 
created by the union of smaller separate conquests. 

The dislocated state of Britain seems, next to its desertion by 
the Romans, to have made way for the conquerors. The same 
weak obstinacy which had failed to combine against invasion, 
refused to accept the new dominion; and the Saxons, merciless 
by habit, were provoked by the sullen and treacherous attitude 
of their victims. The Britons fled from their homes: whom the 
sword spared, famine and pestilence devoured; the few that 
remained either refused or failed altogether to civilize the con- 
querors. For a century and a half after their arrival the Saxons 
remained heathen ; for a century after their conversion they were 
repelled from communion with the Celts; the Britons retarded 
rather than promoted the religious change which the Spaniards 
forced on the Arian conquerors, and which Clovis voluntarily 
adopted to unite him with his Gallic subjects. This period, in- 
stead of being one of amalgamation, was one of divarication. There 
was room enough for both Britons and Saxons : the Roman cities 



Old Britain and the Anglo-Saxon Conquest 9 

might have been homes for the one and the woods and broad pas- 
tures have furnished the others with their favorite prospects. But 
the cities went to ruin; Christianity became extinct, and all 
culture with it. There were still Roman roads leading to the walls 
and towers of empty cities; the Roman divisions of the land were 
conspicuous: the intrenched and fortified camps, the great villas 
of the princely families, churches, and burial-places, but they 
were become, before the days of Bede, mere haunted ruins, some- 
thing like the mysterious fabrics which in Central America tell 
of the rule of a mighty race whose name is forgotten. 

§ 3. British and Roman Survivals 

It is not to be supposed that this desolation was uniform ; in 
some of the cities there were probably elements of continuous 
life. London the mart of the merchants, York the capital of the 
North, and some others have a continuous political existence, al- 
though they wisely do not venture, like some of the towns of South- 
ern France, to claim an unbroken succession from Roman munici- 
palities. The new race found the convenience of ready-built 
houses and accumulated stores of material; and wherever the 
cities were spared, a portion at least of the city population must 
have continued also. In the country, too, especially toward the 
West and the debatable border, great numbers of Britons may 
have survived in servile or half-servile condition; some few of 
the greater men may have made, and probably did make, terms 
for themselves, especially in the districts appropriated by the 
smaller detachments of adventurers; and the public lands of the 
new kingdoms must have required native cultivators. But all 
these probabilities only bring out more strongly the improbability 
of any general commixture or amalgamation of the races. Cen- 
turies after the conquest the Briton by extraction was distin- 
guished by his wergild from the man of the ruling race. It is 
impossible that such a commixture could have taken place with- 
out leaving its traces on the languages or the religion. The Eng- 
lish of Alfred's time is, except where the common terms of eccle- 
siastical language come in, purely Germanic ; British Christianity 
stood out against Saxon for a century after the death of Augustine; 
and the vestiges of Romano-British law which have filtered through 
local custom into the common law of England, as distinct from 
those which were imported in the Middle Ages through the scien- 
tific study of law or the insensible infection of cosmopolitan civili- 
zation, are infinitesimal. . . . 



io English Historians 

§ 4. Two Important Results of the Conquest. 

If it were possible to form a clear idea of the amount of civili- 
zation which the invaders already possessed, or of the organiza- 
tion which they were to substitute for that which thus vanished 
before them, we should be better able to determine the effect which 
was produced on them by the process of conquest. But as it 
is, only two great generalizations seem possible. In the first 
place, conquest under the circumstances compelled colonization 
and migration. The wives and families were necessary to the 
comfort and continued existence of the settlements. It was not 
only that the attitude of the Britons forbade intermarriages; the 
Saxons, as all testimony has shown, declined the connubium of 
foreign races ; they could not give to the strange woman the sacred 
prerogative of the German woman, let her cast their lots or rear 
their children. The tie of the cognatio and the gens was as strong 
as it had been of old ; the new settlements were called by Gentile 
names, and these names involved the retention of the rights and 
duties of the tnaegth, the kindred. The invaders came in fami- 
lies and kindred, and in the full organization of their tribes; the 
three ranks of men, the noble, the freeman, and the laet. . . . 

The process of migration and conquest must have produced 
royalty, and the important political appurtenances of royalty. 
The Saxons had no kings at home, but they created kingdoms in 
Britain. The testimony of tradition helps to confirm what is 
a sufficiently safe inference. According to the Chronicle the 
Brito-Welsh in a.d. 443 invited to Britain the Ethelings of the 
Angles; in a.d. 449 under two heretogas, Hengist and Horsa, 
the strangers came; in a.d. 455 Hengist and Aesc his son came 
to the kingdom. In a.d. 495 " came two ealdormen to Britain, 
Cerdic and Cynric "; in a.d. 519 they became kings of the West 
Saxons. In Northumbria and East Anglia, when the "proceres" 
had in long rivalry occupied provinces and fought battles, they 
set up out of the most noble a king over them. In each case the 
erection of the throne was probably the result of some great vic- 
tory, or of the permanent securing of a definite territory ; but the 
institution was not a transference of British royalty; the new kings 
are kings of the nations which they had led to conquest, not of those 
they had conquered. In each case the son is named with his father 
as sharing in the first assumption of the title, a recognition of the 
hereditary character which is almost the only mark distinguishing 
the German kingship from the elective chieftainship. The royal 



Old Britain and the Anglo-Saxon Conquest 1 1 

houses thus founded assume a divine pedigree; all trace their 
origin to Woden ; and when they become extinct the independence 
of their nation comes to an end. 

Bibliographical Note 

Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond. Vinogradoff, The Growth of the 
Manor. Seebohm, The English Village Community. Fustel de Coulanges, 
Origin of Property in Lani, especially the introductory essay by Professor 
Ashley. Stubbs, Lectures on Early English History, chap. x. Coote, 
The Romans in Britain, supporting the theory of the Roman survival. Guest, 
Early English Settlements. Freeman, Four Oxford Lectures (1888), defend- 
ing the Teutonic theory. Hodgkin, Political History of England to 1066, 
chap. vi. Haverfield, Early British Christianity, in the English Historical 
Review, 1896, pp. 429 ff. Brief summary of the conflicting views in Med- 
ley, Constitutional History of England, introductory chapter. 



CHAPTER III 

ADOPTION OF CHRISTIANITY AND UNIFICATION OF ENGLAND 

Whatever may have been the nature of the Anglo-Saxon con- 
quest and settlement, the immediate political result was the 
foundation of several petty tribal states among which there en- 
sued three centuries of warfare for supremacy. Dull as the 
annals of these three hundred years are, the period was never- 
theless one of great importance in the building of the English 
nation. The heathen conquerors were converted to Christianity, 
Britain was brought into close relations with Rome, a well- 
planned ecclesiastical system was founded, monks began there 
the work of civilization, the arts of peace flourished in spite of 
the conflicts, and learning increased. Doubtless the most vivid 
and interesting account of this period is to be found in John 
Richard Green's Short History of the English People. 

§ i. Rise of Kent and Landing of Augustine 1 

The conquest of the bulk of Britain was now complete (ca. 588). 
Eastward of a line which may be roughly drawn along the moor- 
lands of Northumberland and Yorkshire, through Derbyshire 
and skirting the Forest of Arden to the mouth of the Severn, and 
thence by Mendip to the sea, the island had passed into English 
hands. From this time the character of the English conquest of 
Britain was wholly changed. The older wars of extermination 
came to an end, and as the invasion pushed westward in later times 
the Britons were no longer wholly driven from the soil, but mingled 
with their conquerors. A far more important change was that 
which was seen in the attitude of the English conquerors from this 
time toward each other. Freed to a great extent from the com- 
mon pressure of the war against the Britons, their energies 

1 Green, Short History of the English People, pp. 26 ff. By permission 
of Mrs. John Richard Green. 

12 



Adoption of Christianity 13 

turned to combats with one another, to a long struggle for over- 
lordship which was to end in bringing about a real national 
unity. 

The West-Saxons, beaten back from their advance along the 
Severn valley, and overthrown in a terrible defeat at Faddiley, 
were torn by internal dissensions, even while they were battling 
for life against the Britons. Strife between the two rival king- 
doms of Bernicia and Deira in the north absorbed the power of 
the Engle in that quarter, till in 588 the strength of Deira suddenly 
broke down, and the Bernician king, .<Ethelric, gathered the two 
peoples into a realm which was to form the later kingdom of Nor- 
thumbria. Amid the confusion of north and south the primacy 
among the conquerors was seized by Kent, where the kingdom of 
the Jutes rose suddenly into greatness under a king called iEthel- 
berht, who before 597 established his supremacy over the Saxons 
of Middlesex and Essex, as well as over the English of East Anglia 
and of Mercia as far north as the Humber and the Trent. 

The overlordship of /Ethelberht was marked by a renewal of 
that intercourse of Britain with the Continent which had been 
broken off by the conquests of the English. His marriage with 
Bertha, the daughter of the Frankish King Charibert of Paris, 
created a fresh tie between Kent and Gaul. But the union had 
far more important results than those of which /Ethelberht may 
have dreamed. Bertha, like her Frankish kinsfolk, was a Chris- 
tian. A Christian bishop accompanied her from Gaul to Canter- 
bury, the royal city of the kingdom of Kent; and a ruined Chris- 
tian Church, the Church of St. Martin, was given them for their 
worship. The marriage of Bertha was an opportunity which was 
at once seized by the bishop, who at this time occupied the Roman 
See, and who is justly known as Gregory the Great. A memo- 
rable story tells us how, when but a young Roman deacon, 
Gregory had noted the white bodies, the fair faces, the golden 
hair of some youths who stood bound in the market-place of Rome. 
"From what country do these slaves come?" he asked the traders 
who brought them. "They are English, Angles!" the slave 
dealers answered. The deacon's pity veiled itself in poetic 
humor. "Not Angles but Angels," he said, "with faces so angel- 
like ! From what country come they?" "They come," said the 
merchants, "from Deira." "De ira!" was the untranslatable 
reply, "aye, plucked from God's ire, and called to Christ's mercy! 
And what is the name of their king?" "vElla," they told him; 
and Gregory seized on the words as of good omen. "Alleluia 



14 English Historians 

shall be sung in Ella's land!" he cried, and passed on, musing 
how the angel faces should be brought to sing it. 

Only three or four years had gone by when the deacon had 
become bishop of Rome, and Bertha's marriage gave him the open- 
ing he sought. After cautious negotiations with the rulers of 
Gaul, he sent a Roman abbot, Augustine, at the head of a band 
of monks, to preach the gospel to the English people. The mis- 
sionaries landed in 597 on the very spot where Hengist had landed 
more than a century before in the Isle of Thanet; and the king 
received them sitting in the open air on the chalk-down above 
Minster, where the eye nowadays catches miles away over the 
marshes the dim tower of Canterbury. He listened to the long 
sermon as the interpreters whom Augustine had brought with him 
from Gaul translated it. "Yourw r ords are fair," /Ethelberht re- 
plied at last, with English good sense; "but they are new and of 
doubtful meaning"; for himself, he said, he refused to forsake 
the gods of his fathers, but he promised shelter and protection to 
the strangers. The band of monks entered Canterbury, bearing 
before them a silver cross with a picture of Christ, and singing in 
concert the strains of the litany of their Church. "Turn from this 
city, Lord," they sang, "Thine anger and wrath, and turn it 
from Thy holy house, for we have sinned." And then in strange 
contrast came the jubilant cry of the older Hebrew worship, the 
cry which Gregory had wrested in prophetic earnestness from the 
name of the Yorkshire king in the Roman market-place, "Alle- 
luia." 

It is strange that the spot which witnessed the landing of Hen- 
gist should be yet better known as the landing place of Augus- 
tine. But the second landing at Ebbsfleet was in no small meas- 
ure the reversal and undoing of the first. "Strangers from Rome " 
was the title with which the missionaries first fronted the English 
king. The march of the monks as they chanted their solemn 
litany was, in one sense, the return of the Roman legions who had 
retired at the trumpet-call of Alaric. It was to the tongue and 
the thought not of Gregory only but of such men as his own Jutish 
fathers had slaughtered and driven over the sea that yEthelberht 
listened in the preaching of Augustine. Canterbury, the earliest 
royal city of the new England, became the centre of Latin influence. 
The Roman tongue became again one of the tongues of Britain, 
the language of its worship, its correspondence, its literature. 
But more than the tongue of Rome returned with Augustine. 
Practically his landing renewed the union with the Western world 



Adoption of Christianity 15 

which the landing of Hengist had all but destroyed. The new 
England was admitted into the older commonwealth of nations. 
The civilization, arts, letters, which had fled before the sword 
of the English conquest, returned with the Christian faith. The 
fabric of the Roman law indeed never took root in England, but 
it is impossible not to recognize the result of the influence of the 
Roman missionaries in the fact that the codes of customary Eng- 
lish law began to be put into writing soon after their arrival. 

As yet these great results were still distant ; a year passed before 
^Ethelberht yielded, and though after his conversion thousands of 
Kentish men crowded to baptism, it was years before he ventured 
to urge the under-kings of Essex and East Anglia to receive the 
creed of their overlord. The effort of /Ethelberht, however, only 
heralded a revolution which broke the power of Kent forever. 
The tribes of mid-Britain revolted against his supremacy, and 
gathered under the overlord ship of Raedwald of East Anglia. 
The revolution clearly marked the change which had passed 
over Britain. Instead of a chaos of isolated peoples, the con- 
querors were now, in fact, gathered into three great groups. The 
Engle kingdom of the north reached from the Humber to the Forth. 
The southern kingdom of the W.est-Saxons stretched from Watling 
Street to the Channel. And between these was roughly sketched 
out the great kingdom of mid-Britain, which, however its limits 
may vary, retained a substantial identity from the time of /Ethel- 
berht to the final fall of the Mercian kings. For the next two 
hundred years the history of England lies in the struggle of Nor- 
thumbrian, Mercian, and West-Saxon kings to establish their su- 
premacy over the general mass of Englishmen, and unite them 
in a single England. 

§ 2. Supremacy and Conversion of Northumbria 

In this struggle, the lead was at once taken by Northumbria, 
which was rising into a power that set all rivalry at defiance. 
Under ^Ethelfrith, who had followed ^thelric in 593, the work 
of conquest went on rapidly. In 603 the forces of the northern 
Britons were annihilated in a great battle at Daegsastan, and the 
rule of Northumbria was established from the Humber to the Forth. 
Along the west of Britain there stretched the unconquered king- 
doms of Strathclyde and Cumbria, which extended from the 
river Clyde to the Dee, and the smaller British states which oc- 
cupied what we now call Wales. Chester formed the link between 



1 6 English Historians 

these two bodies; and it was Chester that iEthelfrith chose in 
613 for his next point of attack. Some miles from the city two 
thousand monks were gathered in the monastery of Bangor, and 
after imploring in a three days' fast the help of Heaven for their 
country, a crowd of these ascetics followed the British army to 
the field. /Ethelfrith watched the wild gestures and outstretched 
arms of the strange company as it stood apart, intent upon prayer, 
and took the monks for enchanters. "Bear they arms or no," 
said the king, "they war against us when they cry against us to 
their God," and in the surprise and rout which followed the monks 
were the first to fall. 

The British kingdoms were now utterly parted from one another. 
By their victory at Deorham the West-Saxons had cut off the 
Britons of Devon and Cornwall from the general body of their 
race. By his victory at Chester, /Ethelfrith broke this body 
again into two several parts, by parting the Britons of Wales from 
those of Cumbria and Strathclyde. From this time the warfare 
of Briton and Englishman died down into a warfare of separate 
English kingdoms against separate British kingdoms, of North- 
umbria against Cumbria and Strathclyde, of Mercia against 
modern Wales, of Wessex against the tract of British country 
from Mendip to the Land's End. . . . 

The greatness of Northumbria reached its height under Ead- 
Wine (617-633). Within his own dominions Eadwine displayed 
a genius for civil government which shows how completely the 
mere age of the conquest had passed away. With him began the 
English proverb so often applied to after kings, "A woman with 
her babe might walk scatheless from sea to sea in Eadwine 's 
day." Peaceful communication revived along the deserted high- 
ways; the springs by the roadside were marked with stakes, and a 
cup of brass set beside each for the traveller's refreshment. Some 
faint traditions of the Roman past may have flung their glory 
round this new "Empire of the English"; some of its majesty 
had at any rate come back with its long-lost peace. A royal 
standard of purple and gold floated before Eadwine as he rode 
through the villages ; a feather-tuft attached to a spear, the Roman 
tufa, preceded him as he walked through the streets. The North- 
umbrian king was, in fact, supreme over Britain as no king of 
English blood had been before. Northward his frontier reached 
the Forth, and was guarded by a city which bore his name, Edin- 
burgh, Eadwine's burgh, the city of Eadwine. Westward, he 
was master of Chester, and the fleet he equipped there subdued 



Adoption of Christianity 17 

the isles of Anglesey and Man. South of the Humber he was 
owned as overlord by the whole English race, save Kent ; and even 
Kent was bound to him by his marriage with its king's sister. 

With the Kentish queen came Paulinus, one of Augustine's 
followers, whose tall, stooping form, slender aquiline nose, and 
black hair falling round a thin worn face, were long remembered 
in the north; and the Wise Men of Northumbria gathered to 
deliberate on the new faith to which Paulinus and his queen soon 
converted Eadwine. To finer minds its charm lay in the light 
it threw on the darkness which encompassed men's lives, the 
darkness of the future as of the past. "So seems the life of man, 
O king," burst forth an aged Ealdorman, "as a sparrow's flight 
through the hall when you are sitting at meat in winter-tide, with 
the warm fire lighted on the hearth, but the icy rain-storm with- 
out. The sparrow flies in at one door and tarries for a moment 
in the light and heat of the hearth-fire, and then flying forth from 
the other, vanishes into the wintry darkness whence it came. So 
tarries for a moment the life of man in our sight ; but what is before 
it, what after it, we know not. If this new teaching tells us aught 
certainly of these, let us follow it." Coarser argument told on 
the crowd. "None of your people, Eadwine, have worshipped 
the gods more busily than I," said Coin the priest, "yet there 
are many more favored and more fortunate. Were these gods 
good for anything, they would help their worshippers." Then, 
leaping on horseback, he hurled his spear into the sacred temple 
at Godmanham, and with the rest of the Witan embraced the 
religion of the king. . . . 

§ 3. The Irish Church and the Synod of Whitby 

It was not the Church of Paulinus which in after years nerved 
Oswald to the struggle for the cross, when he succeeded to the 
torn kingdom of Northumbria. Paulinus had fled from Northum- 
bria at Eadwine's fall; and the Roman Church in Kent shrank 
into inactivity before the heathen reaction. Its place in the con- 
version of England was taken by missionaries from Ireland. To 
understand, however, the true meaning of the change, we must 
remember that before the landing of the English in Britain, 
the Christian Church comprised every country, save Germany, 
in Western Europe, as far as Ireland itself. The conquest of 
Britain by the pagan English thrust a wedge of heathendom into 
the heart of this great communion, and broke it into two unequal 
c 



1 8 English Historians 

parts. On the one side lay Italy, Spain, and Gaul, whose churches 
owned obedience to the See of Rome, on the other the Church 
of Ireland. But the condition of the two portions of Western 
Christendom was very different. While the vigor of Christianity 
in Italy and Gaul and Spain was exhausted in a bare struggle 
for life, Ireland, which remained unscourged by invaders, drew 
from its conversion an energy such as it has never known since. 

Christianity had been received there with a burst of popular 
enthusiasm, and letters and arts sprang up rapidly in its train. 
The science and Biblical knowledge which fled from the Conti- 
nent took refuge in famous schools, which made Durrow and Ar- 
magh the universities of the West. The new Christian life soon 
beat too strongly to brook confinement within the bounds of Ire- 
land itself. Patrick, the first missionary of the island, had not been 
half a century dead when Irish Christianity flung itself with a 
fiery zeal into battle with the mass of heathenism which was 
rolling in upon the Christian world. Irish missionaries labored 
among the Picts of the Highlands and among the Frisians of the 
northern seas. An Irish missionary, Columban, founded mon- 
asteries in Burgundy and the Apennines. The canton of St. 
Gall still commemorates in its name another Irish missionary 
before whom the spirits of flood and fell fled wailing over the waters 
of the Lake of Constance. • For a time it seemed as if the course 
of the world's history was to be changed, as if the older Celtic 
race that Roman and German had swept before them had turned 
to the moral conquest of their conquerors, as if Celtic and not 
Latin Christianity was to mould the destinies of the churches of 
the West. 

On a low island of barren gneiss-rock off the west coast of 
Scotland an Irish refugee, Columba, had raised the famous mon- 
astery of Iona. Oswald in youth found refuge within its walls, 
and on his accession to the throne of Northumbria he called for 
missionaries from among its monks. The first despatched in an- 
swer to his call obtained little success. He declared on his return 
that among a people so stubborn and barbarous success was 
impossible. "Was it their stubbornness or your severity?" 
asked Aidan, a brother sitting by; "did you forget God's word 
to give them the milk first and then the meat?" All eyes turned 
on the speaker as fittest to undertake the abandoned mission, 
and Aidan sailing at their bidding, fixed his bishop's stool or see 
in the island peninsula of Lindisfarne. Thence, from a monastery 
which gave to the spot its after name of Holy Island, preachers 



Adoption of Christianity in 

poured forth over the heathen realms. Boisil guided a little 
troop of missionaries to the valley of the Tweed. Aidan himself 
wandered on foot preaching among the peasants of Bernicia. 
The new religion served as a prelude to the Northumbrian advance. 

If Oswald was a saint, he was none the less resolved to build up 
again the realm of Eadwine. Having extended his supremacy 
over the Britons of Strathclyde and won the submission of the 
Lindiswaras, he turned to reassert his supremacy over Wessex. 
The reception of the new faith became the mark of submission to 
his overlordship. A preacher, Birinus, had already penetrated from 
Gaul into Wessex; in Oswald's presence its king received baptism, 
and established with his assent a see for his people in the royal city 
of Dorchester on the Thames. Oswald ruled as wide a realm as 
his predecessor; but for after times the memory of his greatness 
was lost in the legends of his piety. A new conception of kingship 
began to blend itself with that of the warlike glory of iEthelfrith 
or the wise administration of Eadwine. The moral power which 
was to reach its height in Alfred first dawns in the story of Os- 
wald. In his own court the king acted as interpreter to the Irish 
missionaries in their efforts to convert his thegns. "By reason 
of his constant habit of praying or giving thanks to the Lord he 
was wont wherever he sat to hold his hands upturned on his 
knees." As he feasted with Bishop Aidan by his side, the thegn, 
or noble of his war-band, whom he had set to give alms to the 
poor at his gate, told him of a multitude that still waited fasting 
without. The king at once bade the untasted meat before him 
be carried to the poor and his silver dish be divided piecemeal 
among them. Aidan seized the royal hand and blessed it. "May 
this hand," he cried, "never grow old." . . . 

The labors of Aidan, the victories cf Oswald and Oswiu, 
seemed to have annexed England to the Irish Church. The monks 
of Lindisfarne, or of the new religious house whose foundation fol- 
lowed that of Lindisfarne, looked for their ecclesiastical tradition, 
not to Rome but to Ireland; and quoted for their guidance the 
instruction, not of Gregory but of Columba. Whatever claims of 
supremacy over the whole English Church might be pressed by the 
See of Canterbury, the real metropolitan of the Church as it ex- 
isted in the north of England was the abbot of Iona. But Oswiu's 
queen brought with her from Kent the loyalty of the Kentish Church 
to the Roman See, and a Roman party at once formed about her. 
Her efforts were seconded by those of two young thegns whose 
love of Rome mounted to a passionate fanaticism. 



20 English Historians 

The life of Wilfrid of York was a series of flights to Rome 
and returns to England, of wonderful successes in pleading the 
right of Rome to the obedience of the Church of Northumbria, 
and of as wonderful defeats. Benedict Biscop worked toward the 
same end in a quieter fashion, coming backward and forward 
across the sea with books and relics and cunning masons and 
painters to rear a great church and monastery at Wearmouth, 
whose brethren owned obedience to the Roman See. In 652 they 
first set out for a visit to the imperial city ; and the elder Benedict 
soon returned to preach ceaselessly against the Irish usages. He 
was followed by Wilfrid, whose energy soon brought the quarrel 
to a head. The strife between the two parties rose so high at last 
that Oswiu was prevailed upon to summon in 664 a great council 
at Whitby, where the future ecclesiastical allegiance of England 
should be decided. 

The points actually contested were trivial enough. Colman, 
Aidan's successor at Holy Island, pleaded for the Irish fashion of 
the tonsure, and for the Irish time of keeping Easter; Wilfrid 
pleaded for the Roman. The one disputant appealed to the 
authority of Columba, the other to that of St. Peter. " You own," 
said the king at last to Colman, " that Christ gave to Peter the 
keys of the kingdom of heaven — has He given such power to 
Columba?" The bishop could but answer "No." "Then will 
I rather obey the porter of Heaven," said Oswiu, "lest when I 
reach its gates he who has the keys in his keeping turn his back 
on me, and there be none to open." The importance of Oswiu's 
judgment was never doubted at Lindisfarne, where Colman, fol- 
lowed by the whole of the Irish-born brethren and thirty of their 
English fellows, forsook the See of Aidan and sailed 'away to 
lona. 

Trivial in fact as were the actual points of difference which 
severed the Roman Church from the Irish, the question to which 
communion Northumbria should belong was of immense moment 
to the after fortunes of England. Had the Church of Aidan finally 
won, the later ecclesiastical history of England would probably 
have resembled that of Ireland. Devoid of that power of organi- 
zation which was the strength of the Roman Church, the Celtic 
Church in its own Irish home took the clan system of the country 
as the basis of Church government. Tribal quarrels and eccle- 
siastical controversies became inextricably confounded; and the 
clergy, robbed of all really spiritual influence, contributed no ele- 
ment save that of disorder to the state. Hundreds of wandering 



Adoption of Christianity 21 

bishops, as a vast religious authority wielded by hereditary chief- 
tains, the disassociation of piety from morality, the absence of those 
larger and more humanizing influences which contact with a wider 
world alone can give: this is the picture which the Irish Church 
of later times presents to us. It was from such a chaos as this that 
England was saved by the victory of Rome in the Synod of Whitby. 

§ 4. Theodore and the Church in England 

The Church of England, as we know it to-day, is the work, so 
far as its outer form is concerned, of a Greek monk, Theodore of 
Tarsus, whom Rome, after her victory at Whitby, despatched in 
668 as Archbishop of Canterbury, to secure England to her sway. 
Theodore's work was determined in its main outlines by the pre- 
vious history of the English people. The conquest of the con- 
tinent had been wrought either by races such as the Goths, who 
were already Christian, or by heathens like the Franks, who bowed 
to the Christian faith of the nations they conquered. To this 
oneness of religion between the German invaders of the Empire 
and their Roman subjects was owing the preservation of all that 
survived of the Roman world. The Church everywhere remained 
untouched. The Christian bishop became the defender of the 
conquered Italian or Gaul against his Gothic and Lombard con- 
queror, the mediator between the German and his subjects, the 
one bulwark against barbaric violence and oppression. To the 
barbarian, on the other hand, he was the representative of all that 
was venerable in the past, the living record of law, of letters, and 
of art. But in Britain priesthood and people had been exter- 
minated together. 

When Theodore came to organize the Church of England, the 
very memory of the older Christian Church which existed in Ro- 
man Britain had passed away. The first Christian missionaries, 
strangers in a heathen land, attached themselves necessarily to 
the courts of the kings, who were their first converts, and whose 
conversion was generally followed by that of their people. The 
English bishops were thus at first royal chaplains, and their 
diocese was naturally nothing but the kingdom. The kingdom 
of Kent became the diocese of Canterbury, and the kingdom of 
Northumbria the diocese of York. In this way two realms which 
are all but forgotten are commemorated in the limits of existing 
sees. That of Rochester represented till of late an obscure king- 
dom of West Kent, and the frontier of the original kingdom of 



11 English Historians 

Mercia might be recovered by following the map of the ancient 
bishopric of Lichfield. 

Theodore's first work was to order the dioceses; his second was 
to add many new sees to the old ones, and to group all of them 
around the one centre of Canterbury. All ties between England 
and the Irish Church were roughly broken. Lindisfarne sank 
into obscurity with the flight of Colman and his monks. The 
new prelates, gathered in synod after synod, acknowledged the 
authority of their one primate. The organization of the episcopate 
was followed during the next hundred years by the development 
of the parish system. The loose system of the mission-station, 
the monastery from which priest and bishop went forth on journey 
after journey to preach and baptize, as Aidan went forth from 
Lindisfarne or Cuthbert from Melrose, naturally disappeared as 
the land became Christian. The missionaries became settled 
clergy. The holding of the English noble or landowner became 
the parish, and his chaplain the parish priest, as the king's chaplain 
had become the bishop, and the kingdom his diocese. A source 
of permanent endowment for the clergy was found at a later time 
in the revival of the Jewish system of tithes, and in the annual gift 
to Church purposes of a tenth of the produce of the soil; while 
discipline within the Church itself was provided for by an elabo- 
rate code of sin and penance in which the principle of compen- 
sation which lay at the root of the Teutonic legislation crept into 
the relations between God and the soul. 

In his work of organization, in his increase of bishoprics, in 
his arrangement of dioceses, and the way in which he grouped 
them around the See of Canterbury, in his national synods and 
ecclesiastical canons, Theodore was unconsciously doing a politi- 
cal work. The old divisions of kingdoms and tribes about him, 
divisions which had sprung for the most part from mere accidents 
of the conquest, were fast breaking down. The smaller states were 
by this time practically absorbed by the three larger ones, and of 
these three Mercia and Wessex had for a time bowed to the over- 
lordship of Northumbria. The tendency to national unity which 
was to characterize the new England had thus already declared 
itself ; but the policy of Theodore clothed with a sacred form and 
surrounded with divine sanctions a unity which as yet rested on no 
basis but the sword. 

The single throne of the one primate at Canterbury accustomed 
men's minds to the thought of a single throne for their one tem- 
poral overlord at York, or, as in later days, at Lichfield, or at 



Adoption of Christianity 23 

Winchester. The regular subordination of priest to bishop, of 
bishop to primate, in the administration of the Church, supplied 
a mould on which the civil organization of the State quietly shaped 
itself. Above all, the councils gathered by Theodore were the 
first of all national gatherings for general legislation. It was at a 
much later time that the Wise Men of Wessex, or Northumbria, 
or Mercia, learned to come together in the Witenagemot of all 
England. It was the ecclesiastical synods which by their example 
led the way to our national parliament, as it was the canons en- 
acted in such synods which led the way to a national system of 
law. . . . 

§ 5. Bceda, the Father of English Learning 

While the two southern kingdoms (Mercia and Wessex) were 
wasting their energies in a desperate struggle, Northumbria had 
set aside its efforts at conquest for the pursuits of peace. Under 
the reigns of Ecgfrith's successors, Aldfrith the Learned and the 
four kings who followed him, the kingdom became in the middle 
of the eighth century the literary centre of Western Europe. No 
schools were more famous than those of Jarrow and York. The 
whole learning of the age seemed to be summed up in a Northum- 
brian scholar. Baeda — the Venerable Bede, as later times styled 
him — was born in 673, nine years after the Synod of Whitby, on 
ground which passed a year later to Benedict Biscop as the site 
of the great abbey which he reared by the mouth of the Wear. 
His youth was trained and his long tranquil life was wholly spent 
in an off-shoot of Benedict's house which was founded by his 
friend Ceolfrid. Baeda never stirred from Jarrow. "I have 
spent my whole life in the same monastery," he says, "and while 
attentive to the rule of my order and the service of the Church 
my constant pleasure lay in learning, or teaching, or writing." 
The words sketch for us a scholar's life, the more touching in its 
simplicity that it is the life of the first great English scholar. 

The quiet grandeur of a life consecrated to knowledge, the tran- 
quil pleasure that lies in learning and teaching and writing, 
dawned for Englishmen in the story of Baeda. While still young 
he became teacher; and six hundred monks besides strangers 
that flocked thither for instruction formed his school of Jarrow. 
It is hard to imagine how among the toils of the schoolmaster 
and the duties of the monk B.e li could have found time for the 
composition of the numerous work.3 that rude his name famous in 



24 English Historians 

the west. But materials for study had accumulated in North- 
umbria through the journeys of Wilfrid and Benedict Biscop and 
the libraries which were forming at Wearmouth and York. The 
tradition of the old Irish teachers still lingered to direct the young 
scholar into that path of scriptural interpretation to which he 
chiefly owed his fame. Greek, a rare accomplishment in the west, 
came to him from the school which the Greek archbishop Theo- 
dore founded beneath the walls of Canterbury. His skill in the 
ecclesiastical chant was derived from a Roman cantor whom 
Pope Vitalian sent in the train of Benedict Biscop. Little by little 
the young scholar thus made himself master'of the whole range of 
the science of his time; he became, as Burke rightly styled him, 
"the father of English learning." The tradition of the older 
classic culture was first revived for England in his quotations of 
Plato and Aristotle, of Seneca and Cicero, of Lucretius and Ovid. 
Virgil cast over him the same spell that he cast over Dante; 
verses from the Mneid break his narratives of martyrdoms, and 
the disciple ventures on the track of the great master in a little 
eclogue descriptive of the approach of spring. 

His work was done with small aid from others. "I am my 
own secretary," he writes; "I make my own notes. I am my 
own librarian." But forty-five works remained after his death to 
attest his prodigious industry. In his own eyes and those of his 
contemporaries the most important among these were the commen- 
taries and homilies upon various books of the Bible which he 
had drawn from the writings of the Fathers. But he was far from 
confining himself to theology. In treatises compiled as text-books 
for his scholars, Baeda threw together all that the world had then 
accumulated in astronomy and meteorology, in physics and music, 
in philosophy, grammar, rhetoric, arithmetic, medicine. But the 
encyclopaedic character of his researches left him in heart a simple 
Englishman. He loved his own English tongue; he was skilled 
in English song; his last work was a translation into English of 
the Gospel of St. John, and almost the last words that broke from 
his lips were some English rimes upon death. 

But the noblest proof of his love of England lies in the work 
which immortalizes his name. In his Ecclesiastical History of 
the English Nation, Baeda became the first English historian. 
All that we really know of the century and a half that follows the 
landing of Augustine we know from him. Wherever his own per- 
sonal observation extended, the story is told with admirable detail 
and force. He is hardly less full or accurate in the portions which 



Adoption of Christianity 25 

he owed to his Kentish friends. Albinus and Nothelm. What he 
owed to no informant was his own exquisite faculty of story-telling, 
and yet no story of his own telling is so touching as the story of 
his death. Two weeks before the Easter of 735 the old man 
was seized with an extreme weakness and loss of breath. He still 
preserved, however, his usual pleasantness and good humor, 
and in spite of prolonged sleeplessness continued his lectures to 
the pupils about him. Verses of his own English tongue broke 
from time to time from the master's lips — rude rimes that told 
how before the "need-fare," Death's stern " must-go," none can 
enough bethink him what is to be his doom for good or ill. The 
tears of Baeda's scholars mingled with his song. "We never 
read without weeping," writes one of them. So the days rolled 
on to Ascension-tide, and still master and pupils toiled at their 
work, for Baeda longed to bring to an end his version of St. John's 
Gospel into the English tongue, and his extracts from Bishop 
Isidore. "I don't want my boys to read a lie," he answered 
those who would have had him rest, "or to work to no purpose 
after I am gone." 

A few days before Ascension-tide his sickness grew upon him, 
but he spent the whole day in teaching, only saying cheerfully to 
his scholars, "Learn with what speed you may; I know not how 
long I may last." The dawn broke on another sleepless night 
and again the old man called his scholars round him and bade 
them write. "There is still a chapter wanting," said the scribe 
as the morning drew on, "and it is hard for thee to question thyself 
any longer." "It is easily done," said Baeda; "take thy pen and 
write quickly." Amid tears and farewells the day wore away to 
eventide. "There is yet one sentence unwritten, dear master," 
said the boy. "Write it quickly," bade the dying man. "It is 
finished now," said the little scribe at last. "You speak truth," 
said the master; "all is finished now." Placed upon the pave- 
ment, his head supported in his scholars' arms, his face turned 
to the spot where he was wont to pray, Baeda chanted the solemn 
"Glory to God." As his voice reached the close of his song he 
passed quietly away.' . . . 

§ 6. Mercia and the Supremacy of Wessex 

Under Offa, whose reign from 758 to 796 covers with that of 
/Ethelbald nearly the whole of the eighth century, a middle king- 
dom, Mercia, rose to a height unknown since the days of Wulfhere. 



26 English Historians 

Years, however, had to pass before the new king could set about the 
recovery of Kent ; and it was only after a war of three years that 
in 775 a victory at Otford gave it back to the Mercian realm. 
With Kent Offa doubtless recovered Sussex and Surrey, as well 
as Essex and London ; and four years later a victory at Bensington 
completed the conquest of the district that now forms the shires 
of Oxford and Buckingham. For the nine years that followed, 
however, Mercia ventured on no further attempt to extend her 
power over her English neighbors. Like her rivals, she turned 
on the Welsh. Pushing after 779 over the Severn, whose upper 
course had served till now as the frontier between Briton and 
Englishman, Offa drove the king of Powys from his capital/ 
which changed its old name of Pengwyrn for the significant Eng- 
lish title of the town in the scrub or bush, Scrobsbyryg, or 
Shrewsbury. The border-line he drew after his inroad is marked 
by a huge earthwork which runs from the mouth of Wye to that of 
Dee, and is still called Offa's Dyke. A settlement of English- 
men on the land between this dyke and the Severn served as a 
military frontier for the Mercian realm. 

Here, as in the later conquests of the Northumbrians and the 
West-Saxons, the older plan of driving off the conquered from the 
soil was definitely abandoned. The Welsh, who chose to remain, 
dwelt undisturbed among their English conquerors; and it was 
probably to regulate the mutual relations of the two races that 
Offa drew up the code of laws which bore his name. In Mercia 
as in Northumbria attacks on the Britons marked the close of all 
dreams of supremacy over the English themselves. Under Offa, 
Mercia sank into virtual isolation. The anarchy into which 
Northumbria sank after Eadberht's death never tempted him 
to cross the Humber; nor was he shaken from his inaction by- 
as tempting an opportunity which presented itself across the 
Thames. 

Wessex in 786 was torn by a fresh outbreak of anarchy. The 
strife between the rivals that disputed the throne was ended by the 
defeat of Ecgberht, the heir of Ceawlin's line and his flight to Offa's 
court. The Mercian king, however, used his presence not so much 
for schemes of aggrandizement as to bring about a peaceful al- 
liance; and in 789 Ecgberht was driven from Mercia, while Offa 
wedded his daughter to the West-Saxon king Beorhtric. The 
true aim of Offa, indeed, was to unite firmly the whole of Mid- 
Britain, with Kent as its outlet towards Europe, under the Mercian 
crown, and to mark its ecclesiastical as well as its political indepen- 



Adoption of Christianity 27 

dence by the formation in 787 of an archbishopric of Lichfield 
as a check to the See of Canterbury in the south, and a rival to 
the See of York in the north. 

But while Offa was hampered in his projects by the dread of the 
West-Saxons at home, he was forced to watch jealously a power 
which had risen to dangerous greatness over sea, the power of 
the Franks. Till now, the interests of the English people had 
lain wholly within the bounds of the Britain they had won. But 
at this moment our national horizon suddenly widened, and the 
fortunes of England became linked to the general fortunes of 
Western Christendom. It was by the work of English missionaries 
that Britain was first drawn into political relations with the Frank- 
ish court. The Northumbrian Willibrord, and the more famous 
West-Saxon Boniface or Winfrith, followed in the track of earlier 
preachers, both Irish and English, who had been laboring among 
the heathen of Germany, and especially among those who had 
now become subject to the Franks. The Frank king Pippin's 
connection with the English preachers led to constant intercourse 
with England; a Northumbrian scholar, Alcuin, was the centre 
of the literary revival at his court. Pippin's son Charles, known 
in after days as Charles the Great, maintained the same interest 
in English affairs. His friendship with Alcuin drew him into 
close relations with Northern Britain. Ecgberht, the claimant of 
the W r est-Saxon throne, had found a refuge with him since Offa's 
league with Beorhtric in 787. With Offa, too, his relations seem 
to have been generally friendly. 

But the Mercian king shrank cautiously from any connection 
which might imply a recognition of Frankish supremacy. He 
had indeed good grounds for caution. The costly gifts sent by 
Charles to the monasteries of England as of Ireland showed his 
will to obtain an influence in both countries; he maintained re- 
lations with Northumbria, with Kent, with the whole English 
Church. Above all, he harbored at his court exiles from every 
English realm, — exiled kings from Northumbria, East Anglian 
thegns, fugitives from Mercia itself; and Ecgberht probably 
marched in his train when the shouts of the people and priesthood 
of Rome hailed him as Roman Emperor. When the death of 
Beorhtric in 802 opened a way for the exile's return to Wessex, 
the relations of Charles with the English were still guided by the 
dream that Britain, lost to the Empire at the hour when the rest 
of the western provinces were lost, should return to the Empire 
now that Rome had risen again to more than its old greatness 



28 English Historians 

in the west ; and the revolutions which were distracting the 
English kingdoms told steadily in his favor. 

The years since Ecgberht's flight had made little change in 
the state of Britain. Offa's completion of his kingdom by the 
seizure of East Anglia had been followed by his death in 796; 
and under his successor, Cenwulf , the Mercian archbishopric was 
suppressed, and there was no attempt to carry further the suprem- 
acy of the Midland kingdom. Cenwulf stood silently by when 
Ecgberht mounted the West-Saxon throne, and maintained peace 
with the new ruler of Wessex throughout his reign. The first 
enterprise of Ecgberht, indeed, was not directed against his Eng- 
lish but his Welsh neighbors. In 815 he marched into the heart 
of Cornwall, and after eight years of fighting, the last fragment 
of British dominion in the west came to an end. As a nation, 
Britain had passed away with the victories of Deorham and Ches- 
ter ; of the separate British peoples who had still carried on the 
struggle with the three English kingdoms, the Britons of Cumbria 
and of Strathclyde had already bowed to Northumbrian rule; 
the Britons of Wales had owned by tribute to Offa the supremacy 
of Mercia; the last unconquered British state of West Wales as 
far as the Land's End now passed under the mastery of Wessex. 

While Wessex was regaining the strength it had so long lost, 
its rival'in Mid-Britain was sinking into helpless anarchy. Within, 
Mercia was torn by a civil war which broke out on Cenwulf's 
death in 821; and the weakness which this left behind was 
seen when the old strife with Wessex was renewed by his succes- 
sor Beornwulf, who in 825 penetrated into Wiltshire, and was 
defeated in a bloody battle at Ellandun. All England south of 
the Thames at once submitted to Ecgberht of Wessex, and East 
Anglia rose in a desperate revolt which proved fatal to its Mer- 
cian rulers. Two of its kings in succession fell fighting on East 
Anglian soil; and a third, Wiglaf, had hardly mounted the 
Mercian throne when his exhausted kingdom was again called 
on to encounter the West-Saxon. Ecgberht saw that the hour 
had come for a decisive onset. In 828 his army marched north- 
ward without a struggle; Wiglaf fled helplessly before it; and 
Mercia bowed to the West-Saxon overlordship. From Mercia 
Ecgberht marched on Northumbria; but half a century of an- 
archy had robbed that kingdom of all vigor, and pirates were 
already harrying its coast; its nobles met him at Dore in Derby- 
shire, and owned him as their overlord. The work that Oswiu 
and iEthelbald had failed to do was done, and the whole English 



Adoption of Christianity 29 

race in Britain was for the first time knit together under a single 
ruler. Long and bitter as the struggle for independence was 
still to be in Mercia and in the north, yet from the moment that 
Northumbria bowed to its West-Saxon overlord, England was 
made in fact if not as yet in name. 

Bibliographical Note 

Hunt, A History of the English Church, 597-1066. Mason (editor), 
The Mission of St. Augustine. Cutts, Augustine of Canterbury. Ram- 
say, Foundations of England, Vol. I, chaps, xi and xii. Hodgkin, A 
Political History of England to 1066, chaps, vii, xi, and xii. Stubbs, Consti- 
tutional History of England, chap, viii, especially for the organization of 
the Anglo-Saxon Church. Gneist, History of the English Constitution, 
chap. v. 



CHAPTER IV 

ALFRED THE GREAT AND ENGLISH LEARNING 

The triumph of the West-Saxons under Egbert marked the 
overlordship of a new line of kings, rather than the establish- 
ment of national unity. The work of breaking down the strong 
forces of independence which yet remained among the conquered 
states and of welding the tribal groups into an English people 
would have required many generations even if England could 
have had peace. But England was not to have peace. Even 
before Egbert's day, heathen Northmen from Norway and Den- 
mark began to plunder the coasts of Europe and Britain. Before 
long, these piratical expeditions were transformed into systematic 
invasions, and in a long contest with the bold Northmen, Alfred 
the Great was forced to relinquish a large portion of his realm. 
Undaunted by his severe trials on the battlefield, however, Alfred 
devoted himself with great energy to the development of the arts 
of civilization in the dominions that remained to him. It is for 
this work, as well as for his heroic defence of national existence, 
that Alfred won an imperishable fame in English history. 

§ i . Danish Havoc in England l 

The ruin that the Danes had wrought had been no mere mate- 
rial ruin. When they first appeared off her shores, England 
stood in the forefront of European culture; her scholars, her 
libraries, her poetry, had no rivals in the Western world. But all, 
or nearly all, of this culture had disappeared. The art and learn- 
ing of Northumbria had been destroyed at a blow; and through- 
out the rest of the Danelaw the ruin was as complete. The 
very Christianity of Mid-Britain was shaken; the sees of Dun- 
wich and Lindsey came to an end; at Lichfield and Elmham 

1 Green, Conquest of England, pp. 148 ff. By permission of Mrs. John 
Richard Green and Harper & Brothers, Publishers. 

30 



Alfred the Great and English Learning 31 

the succession of bishops became broken and irregular; even 
London hardly kept its bishop's stool. But its letters and civili- 
zation were more than shaken — they had vanished in the sack 
of the great abbeys of the Fen. 

Even in Wessex, which ranked as the least advanced of the 
English kingdoms, /Elfred could recall that he saw, as a child, 
"how the churches stood rilled with treasures and books, and there 
was also a great multitude of God's servants; " but this was "before 
it had all been ravaged and burned." "So clean was learning 
decayed among English folk," says the king, "that very few were 
there on this side Humber that could understand their rituals 
in English, or translate aught out of Latin into English, and I 
ween there were not many beyond the Humber. So few of them 
were there that I cannot bethink me of a single one south of Thames 
when I came to the kingdom." It was, in fact, only in the frag- 
ment of Mercia which had been saved from the invaders that a 
gleam of the old intellectual light lingered in the school which 
Bishop Werfrith had gathered round him at Worcester. 

It is in his efforts to repair this intellectual ruin that we se*e 
Alfred's conception of the work he had to do. The Danes had, 
no doubt, brought with them much that was to enrich the temper 
of the coming England, a larger and freer manhood, a greater 
daring, a more passionate love of personal freedom, better sea- 
manship and a warmer love of the sea, a keener spirit of traffic, 
and a range of trade-ventures which dragged English commerce 
into a wider world. But their work of destruction threatened to 
rob England of things even more precious than these. In saving 
Wessex, Alfred had saved the last refuge of all that we sum up 
in the word "civilization," of that sense of a common citizenship 
and nationality, of the worth of justice and order and good govern- 
ment, of the harmony of individual freedom in its highest form 
with the general security of society, of the need for a cooperation 
of every moral and intellectual force in the development both of 
the individual man and of the people as a whole, which England 
had for two centuries been either winning from its own expe- 
riences or learning from the tradition of the past. 

§ 2. Ml 'j red Seeks Learned Men 

It was because literature embodied what was worthiest in this 
civilization that Alfred turned to the restoration of letters. He 
sought in Mercia for the learning that Wessex had lost. He made 



02 English Historians 

the Mercian Plegmund Archbishop of Canterbury; Werfrith, 
Bishop of Worcester, helped him in his own literary efforts, and 
two Mercian priests — ^thelstan and Werwulf — became his 
chaplains and tutors. But it was by example as well as precept 
that the king called England again to the studies it had abandoned. 
"What of all his troubles troubled him the most," he used to 
say, "was that, when he had the age and ability to learn, he could 
find no masters." But now that masters could be had, he worked 
day and night. He stirred nowhere without having some scholar 
by him. He remained true, indeed, to his own tongue and his 
own literature. His memory was full of English songs, as he had 
caught them from singers' lips; and he was not only fond of re- 
peating them, but taught them carefully to his children. But 
he knew that the actual knowledge of the world must be sought 
elsewhere. Before many years were over he had taught himself 
Latin, and was soon skilled enough in it to render Latin books 
into the English tongue. His wide sympathy sought for aid in this 
work from other lands than his own. "In old time," the king wrote 
sadly, " men came hither from foreign lands to seek for instruction ; 
and now, if we are to have it, we can only get it from abroad." 
He sought it among the West Franks and the East Franks ; Grim- 
bald came from St. Omer to preside over the new abbey he 
founded at Winchester, while John, the Old Saxon, was fetched — 
it may be from the Westphalian abbey of Corbey — to rule the 
monastery he set up at Athelney. 

§ 3. Asser in Royal Service 

A Welsh bishop was drawn with the same end to Wessex; and 
the account he has left of his visit and doings at the court brings us 
face to face with the king. "In those days," says Bishop Asser, 
"I was called by the king from the western and farthest border of 
Britain, and came to Saxon-land; and when, in a long journey, 
I set about approaching him, I arrived, in company with guides 
of that people, as far as the region of the Saxons, who lie on the 
right hand of one's road, which in the Saxon tongue is called 
Sussex. There for the first time I saw the king in the king's 
house, which is named Dene. And when I had been received 
by him with all kindness, he began to pray me earnestly to devote 
myself to his service, and be of his household, and to leave for his 
sake all that I possessed on the western side of Severn, promising 
to recompense me with greater possessions." 



Alfred the Great and English Learning 33 

Asser, however, refused to forsake his home, and Alfred was 
forced to be content with a promise of his return six months after. 
"And when he seemed satisfied with this reply, I gave him my 
pledge to return in a given time, and after four days took horse 
again and set out on my return to my country. But after I had 
left him and reached the city of Winchester, a dangerous fever 
laid hold of me, and for twelve months and a week I lay with little 
hope of life. And when at the set time I did not return to him 
as I had promised, he sent messengers to me to hasten my riding 
to him, and seek for the cause of my delay. But, as I could not 
take horse, I sent another messenger back to him to show him 
the cause of my tarrying, and to declare that if I recovered from 
my infirmity I would fulfil the promise I had made. When my 
sickness then had departed I devoted myself to the king's service 
on these terms, that I should stay with him for six months in every 
year, if I could, or, if not, I should stay three months in Britain and 
three months in Saxon-land. So it came about that I made my 
way to him in the king's house, which is called Leonaford, and 
was greeted by him with all honor. And that time I stayed with 
him in his court through eight months, during which I read to 
him whatever books he would that we had at hand; for it is his 
constant wont, whatever be the hindrances either in mind or body, 
by day and by night, either himself to read books aloud or to listen 
to others reacting them." 

§ 4. Development of English Prose 

The work, however, which most told upon English culture was 
done, not by these scholars, but by /Elfred himself. The king's 
aim was simple and practical. He desired that " every youth 
now in England, that is freeborn and has wealth enough, be set 
to learn, as long as he is not fit for any other occupation, till they 
well know how to read English writing; and let those after- 
wards be taught in the Latin tongue who are to continue learning, 
and be promoted to a higher rank." For this purpose he set 
up, like Charles the Great, a school for the young nobles at his 
own court. Books were needed for them as well as for the priests, 
to the bulk of whom Latin was a strange tongue, and the king 
set himself to provide English books for these readers. It was in 
carrying out this simple purpose that .Elfred changed the whole 
front of English literature. In the paraphrase of Cadmon, in 
the epic of Beowulf, in the verses of Northumbrian singers, in 

D 



34 English Historians 

battle-songs and ballads, English poetry had already risen to a 
grand and vigorous life. 

But English prose hardly existed. Since Theodore's time, 
theology had been the favorite study of English scholars, and the- 
ology naturally took a Latin shape. Historical literature followed 
Baeda's lead in finding a Latin vehicle of expression. Saints' 
lives, which had now become numerous, were as yet always 
written in Latin. It was from Alfred's day that this tide of literary 
fashion suddenly turned. English prose started vigorously into 
life. Theology stooped to an English dress. History became 
almost wholly vernacular. The translation of Latin saint-lives 
into English became one of the most popular literary trades of the 
day. Even medicine found English interpreters. A national 
literature, in fact, sprang suddenly into existence which was with- 
out parallel in the Western world. 

It is thus that in the literatures of modern Europe that of Eng- 
land leads the way. The Romance tongues — the tongues of 
Italy, Gaul, and Spain — were only just emerging into definite 
existence when /Elfred wrote. Ulfilas, the first Teutonic prose- 
writer, found no successors among his Gothic people; and none 
of the German folk across the sea were to possess a prose literature 
of their own for centuries to come. English, therefore, was not 
only the first Teutonic literature — it was the earliest prose litera- 
ture of the modern world. And at the outset of English literature 
stands the figure of /Elfred. The mighty roll of books that fills 
our libraries opens with the translations of the king. 

He took his books as he found them — they were, in fact, the 
popular manuals of his day : the compilation of Orosius, which 
was then the one accessible hand-book of universal history, the 
works of Bceda, the Consolation of Bcethius, the Pastoral Book 
of Pope Gregory. "I wondered greatly," he says, "that of those 
good men who were aforetime all over England, and who had 
learned perfectly these books, none would translate any part into 
their own language. But I soon answered myself, and said, 
'They never thought that men would be so reckless and learning 
so fallen.' " 

As it was, however, the books had to be rendered into English 
by the king himself, with the help of the scholars he had gathered 
round him. "When I remembered," he says, in his preface to 
the Pastoral Book, "how the knowledge of Latin had formerly 
decayed throughout England, and yet many could read English 
writing, I began, among other various and manifold troubles of 



Alfred the Great and English Learning 35 

this kingdom, to translate into English the book which is called 
in Latin Pastoralis, and in English Shepherd's Book, some- 
times word by word, and sometimes according to the sense, as 
I had learned it from Plegmund, my archbishop, and Asser, my 
bishop, and Grimbald, my mass-priest, and John, my mass-priest. 
And when I had learned it as I could best understand it, and as 
I could most clearly interpret it, I translated it into English." 

Alfred was too wise a man not to own the worth of such trans- 
lations in themselves. The Bible, he urged, with his cool common- 
sense, had told on the nations through versions in their own tongues. 
The Greeks knew it in Greek. The Romans knew it in Latin. 
Englishmen might know it, as they might know the other great 
books of the world, in their own English. "I think it better, 
therefore, to render some books that are most needful for men 
to know into the language that we may all undef stand." 

But Alfred showed himself more than a translator. He be- 
came an editor for his people. Here he omitted, there he expanded. 
He enriched his first translation, the Orosius, by a sketch of 
new geographical discoveries in the north. He gave a West- 
Saxon form to his selections from Baeda. In one place he stops 
to explain his theory of government, his wish for a thicker popu- 
lation, his conception of national welfare as consisting in a due 
balance of the priest, the thegn, and the churl. The mention 
of Nero spurs him to an outbreak against abuses of power. The 
cold acknowledgment of a Providence by Bcethius gives way to 
an enthusiastic acknowledgment of the goodness of God. As 
Alfred writes, his large-hearted nature flings off its royal mantle, 
and he talks as a man to men. "Do not blame me," he prays, 
with a charming simplicity, "if any know Latin better than I, 
for every man must say what he says and do what he does accord- 
ing to his ability." 

§ 5. The Old English Chronicle 

Among his earliest undertakings was an English version of 
Baeda's history; and it was probably the making of this version 
which suggested the thought of a work which was to be memorable 
in our literature. Winchester, like most other Episcopal mon- 
asteries, seems to have had its own Bishop's Roll, a series of 
meagre and irregular annals in the Latin tongue, for the most 
part mere jottings of the dates when West-Saxon bishop and West- 
Saxon king mour-ted throne and bishop-stool. The story of this 



^6 English Historians 

Roll and its aftergrowth has been ingeniously traced by modern 
criticism, and the general conclusions at which it has arrived seem 
probable enough. The entries of the Roll were posted up at un- 
certain intervals and with more or less accuracy from the days 
of the first West-Saxon bishop, Birinus. Meagre as they were, 
these earlier annals were historical in character and free from 
any mythical intermixture; but save for a brief space in Ine's 
day they were purely West-Saxon, and with the troubles which 
followed Ine's death they came to an end altogether. 

It was not until the revival of West-Saxon energy under Ecgberht 
that any effort was made to take up the record again and to fill 
up the gap that its closing had made. But Swithun was probably 
the first to begin the series of developments which transformed 
this Bishop's Roll into a national history; and the clerk to whom 
he intrusted its compilation continued the Roll by a series of 
military and political entries to which we owe our knowledge of 
the reign of ^Ethelwulf, while he enlarged and revised the work 
throughout, prefixing to its opening those broken traditions of 
the coming of our fathers which, touched as they are here and 
there by mythical intermixture, remain the one priceless record 
of the conquest of Britain. 

It was this Latin chronicle of Swithun's clerk that Alfred seems 
to have taken in hand about 887, and whose whole character he 
changed by giving it an English form. In its earlier portions he 
carried still further the process of expansion. An introduction 
dating from the birth of Christ, drawn from the work of Baeda, 
was added to its opening, and entries from the same source were 
worked into the after-annals. But it was where Swithun's work 
ended that Alfred's own work really began, for it is from the death 
of i^thelwulf that the Roll widens into a continuous narrative — 
a narrative full of life and originality, whose vigor and freshness 
mark the gift of a new power to the English tongue. 

The appearance of such a work in their own mother-speech 
could not fail to produce a deep impression on the people whose 
story it told. With it English history became the heritage of the 
English people. Baeda had left it accessible merely to noble or 
priest; Alfred was the first to give it to the people at large. Nor 
was this all. The tiny streams of historic record, which had been 
dispersed over the country at large, were from this time drawn 
into a single channel. The Chronicle — for from this time we 
may use the term by which the work has become famous — 
served even more than the presence of the Dane to put an end to 



Alfred the Great and English Learning 37 

the existence of distinct annals in Northumbria and Mercia, and to 
help on the progress of national unity by reflecting everywhere 
the same national consciousness. 

When his work on Baeda was finished, vElfred, it is thought, 
began his translation of the Consolation oj Bcethius; and it is 
not improbable that the metrical translation of the Metra of 
Bcethius was also from his hand. From philosophy and this 
effort at poetry he turned to give to his people a book on practical 
theology. As far as we know, the translation of the Pastoral Rule 
oj Pope Gregory was his last work, and of all his translations it 
was the most carefully done. It is only as we follow the king in 
the manifold activity of his life that we understand his almost 
passionate desire for that "stillness" which was essential to his 
work. But it was only by short spaces that the land was "still," 
and once more Alfred's work of peace was to be broken off by 
a renewal of the old struggle . 

Bibliographical Note 

Plummer, Lije and Times oj Aljred the Great. Pauli, Lije oj King 
Alfred, an old but still useful work. Conybeare, Aljred in the Chroniclers, 
especially valuable for the source material collected. Stevenson, Asser's 
Lije oj King Aljred, a critical edition of this famous work. Bowker (editor), 
Aljred the Great (1899). Ramsay, Foundations oj England, Vol. I, chap, xv, 
a dry but reliable account. Hodgkin, A Political History oj England to 
1066, chap. xvii. 



CHAPTER V 

THE REIGN OF CNUT 

Though Alfred's successors wrested from the Danes the English 
territory which had been lost, they were not able to establish a 
stable and permanent government strong enough to resist all 
attacks on national independence. Toward the close of the tenth 
century the Danes began to harry and invade the land in their 
old fashion. For a time they were bought off with heavy grants 
of money, but they were bent on conquest. In 1016 Edmund 
Ironside, badly supported by his own followers, was forced to 
share his kingdom with the Danish leader Cnut, and, as the 
English king died in the same year, the latter was able to make 
himself master of the country. 

§ 1. Accession of Cnut and Settlement of his Kingdom 1 

Immediately after the death of Eadmund, his powerful vassal, 
Cnut, summoned the bishops, ealdormen, thanes, and all the chief 
men of England to a great assembly at London. On their ap- 
pearance before him, as if distrustful of his own memory, he 
desired those who were witnesses of what had passed between 
him and Eadmund, when they agreed to divide the kingdom, to 
declare what had been said regarding the brothers and sons of the 
latter; whether in the case of his surviving Eadmund, the throne 
should devolve on him or on them. The base and selfish cour- 
tiers immediately declared on oath that Eadmund, neither in 
his lifetime nor when at the point of death, had ever designed 
any portion of his kingdom for his brothers ; but that Cnut, ac- 
cording to the known will of Eadmund, should aid and support 
his children until they were of age to assume the reins of govern- 
ment. 

1 Lappenberg, A History oj England under the Anglo-Saxon Kings, 
Vol. II, pp. 196 ff. 



The Reign of Cnut 39 

This declaration of the exclusion of the brothers was, at a time 
when the pretensions of minors to the throne were seldom re- 
garded, all that Cnut required in order to be acknowledged king 
of all England. With few exceptions, the persons assembled 
swore to choose him for their king, humbly to obey him, and to 
pay tribute to his army; and, having received his pledge given 
with his naked hand, and the oaths of the Danish chiefs, they 
treated with 'contempt the brothers and sons of Eadmund and 
declared them unworthy ever to ascend the throne. Of these 
the clito Eadwig, the highly revered brother of Eadmund, was 
pronounced worthy of banishment; but Cnut, who naturally 
feared him as a rival above all his brothers, lost no time in delib- 
erating with Eadric as to the readiest means of destroying him. 
Eadric hereupon introduced to Cnut, as a fitting instrument, 
a certain nobleman named /Ethelweard, to whom a great reward 
was offered for the head of the prince, but who, while expressing 
his readiness, had no intention to perpetrate the deed. The prince, 
therefore, for that time, escaped with life. 

After a short interval, in the beginning of the following year, 
the election of Cnut took place at London, to which the vassals 
from the remotest parts were summoned. Having entered into 
the customary engagements with the nobles and people, and 
exchanged oaths of lasting friendship and oblivion of all former 
enmities, he ordained a new division of the kingdom. From the 
few ealdormen, whose names have been transmitted to us, it would 
seem that, even in the last years of /Ethelred, the division of the 
country into a number of small provinces had been thought dis- 
advantageous; but Cnut went further in the work of reform 
by dividing England into four parts only. Of these he reserved 
Wessex for his own immediate government, Eadric retained 
Mercia, East Anglia was assigned to Thorkell, who had espoused 
Eadgyth, the widow of the ealdorman Ulfcytel; Northumbria 
was bestowed on Eric, the former jarl of Norway. 

§ 2. Cnut and his Rivals 

A series of measures was next adopted for the security of Cnut 
against the members of the legitimate royal family. The aethel- 
ing Eadwig, against whom a decree of banishment had already 
been pronounced by the WitaH at London, was declared an out- 
law, as well as another Eadwig, probably a relation of the royal 
house, who, for reasons with which we are unacquainted, was 



4<D English Historians 

called the "king of the churls or peasants." The two sons of 
Eadmund, Eadward and Eadmund, the eldest scarcely two 
years old, were sent by Cnut to his half-brother Olaf, king of 
Sweden, who, it seems, would neither take charge of guests who 
might one day involve him in difficulties, nor, yielding to the wishes 
and, as it is said, secret requests of Cnut, cause them to be mur- 
dered. The children were, therefore, sent to Stephen, king of 
Hungary, the brother-in-law, by his wife Gisela, of the German 
king and emperor, Henry the Second, who, as well as Stephen, 
was distinguished by the title of "Saint." 

Cnut had now removed his most dangerous enemies from Eng- 
land. Olaf of Norway (if the poetic sagas of Snorre have any 
historic foundations), who, after the death of Eadmund, afforded 
succor to his brothers, had been beaten back, and over the rest 
of the north the power of Cnut was supreme, either directly 
or through his relations. The chief danger threatened him from 
Normandy, where /Elfgifu-Emma, the widow of ./Ethelred, and 
her two sons were residing with her brother Richard the Second, 
surnamed the Good. After so many deeds of violence, the pol- 
icy of the Northern conqueror excites our astonishment, which 
prompted him to offer his hand to the widow of the Anglo-Saxon 
king, and, without consideration for his and her elder children, 
to promise the succession to those they might have in common. 
By the end of July this marriage was completed, one consequence 
of which seems to have been, besides a closer alliance with Duke 
Richard, the adoption of some milder measures, as we find that 
Eadwig, "the king. of the churls," made his peace with the king 

But Cnut could not consider himself secure while surrounded 
by so many powerful Anglo-Saxons, and in the same year he 
caused Eadwig the aetheling to be murdered. Eadric of Mercia 
also, who had so greatly facilitated his attainment to the throne 
of England, but was an object of hatred both to the Danes 
and Saxons, met with the fate he so richly merited. During 
the Christmas festival an altercation arose between Cnut and 
Eadric, when the latter, with the view apparently of obtaining 
some further rewards, exclaimed, "It was for you that I deserted 
Eadmund, and from fidelity to you I afterwards destroyed him." 
"Then you deserve death," answered the irritated monarch, "for 
treason against God and against me; for having slain your rightful 
sovereign and my sworn brother." Hereupon he summoned to his 
presence the jarl Eric, who was at hand, and who, on a word from 
his master, raised his battle-axe and felled the traitor to the earth. 






The Reign of Cnut 41 

His body being cast over the city wall, was there left unburied. 
At the same time, on mere suspicion, he caused to be slain North- 
man, the son of Leofwine the ealdorman,oneof the chief of Eadric's 
adherents; /Ethelweard, the son of .Ethelmaer the Great, and 
Brihtric, the son of /Elfheah. Northman's possessions were 
inherited by his brother Leofric, who long enjoyed the favor of 
Cnut. One motive for the destruction of so many Anglo-Saxons 
may have been the necessity of rewarding the Danish warriors 
with lands, and thereby fixing them in England. On the other 
hand, all those Anglo-Saxons who, by treason or weakness, had 
contributed to the overthrow of the old dynasty, were with great 
rigor banished by Cnut from his presence, and even from the 
kingdom, as useless and dangerous. A heavy Danegeld of seventy- 
two thousand pounds which was imposed on the English, besides 
ten thousand five hundred pounds, to be paid by the citizens 
of London alone, closed the hostile measures of the new sovereign 
against England, where during the whole remaining part of his 
reign we meet only with one trace of disturbance caused by the 
natives. After the above-mentioned oppressive tax was paid, 
Cnut sent his fleet of about fifty ships back to Denmark. 

§ 3. Cnut as Ruler 

A remarkable change in the government of Cnut is at this time 
observable: we perceive him, if not a ruler to be compared with 
Charles the Great, yet a conqueror who was not hated, and under 
whom the people were probably happier than they had latterly 
been under their native sovereigns. The stern warrior appears 
from this time as a provident and wise ruler, capable of valuing 
and promoting and profiting by all the blessings of peace. The 
legal state of the country was settled in a great witenagemot at 
Oxford, and the legislation as it had been in the days of King 
Eadgar adopted as the model. The laws of Eadgar had shown 
particular regard to the Danes dwelling in England, while in 
those of iEthelred, as far as we are acquainted with them, similar 
provisions do not appear; they may even have contained enact- 
ments by which the customary laws of that nation were infringed. 
Cnut, moreover, devoted the greatest attention to the adminis- 
tration of the laws, and in pursuance of this object frequently jour- 
neyed through his English states from one boundary to another, 
attended by his counsellors and scribes. As a result of these 
judicial labors may be regarded the numerous laws enacted 



42 English Historians 

by Cnut for the Anglo-Saxons, both ecclesiastical and secular, 
among the latter of which have been reckoned a collection of pro- 
visions relative to the royal forests and the chase. In these it 
is particularly striking with what care their distinctive rights are 
preserved to the Anglo-Saxons and their several provinces, as 
well as to the Danes, to whom no legal favor appears to have been 
shown, and how everything seems to have been done to satisfy 
the pretensions of the clergy. In which year of Cnut's reign 
these laws were published at Winchester is, according to the cus- 
tom of that age, not specified, and few, if any, attempts have since 
been made to ascertain it. They do not, however, appear to 
have been composed in the first years of his reign, and are, there- 
fore, not to be confounded with the before-mentioned confirma- 
tion of Eadgar's laws, as may be inferred from their preamble, 
which shows them to be posterior to the reconquest of Norway 
in 1028, as well as from the reintroduction of St. Peter's penny. 

§ 4. Cnut and his Military System 

With greater probability may be reckoned among the earlier 
labors of Cnut the composition of the Witherlags Ret, a 
court- or gild-law, framed for his standing army, as well as for 
the body-guards of his jarls. As the greater part of his army 
remained in England, the Witherlags Ret was there first estab- 
lished, and as the introduction of strict discipline among such a 
military community must precede all other ameliorations in the 
condition of the country, the mention of this law in its history 
ought not to be omitted. The immediate military attendants of 
a conqueror always exercise vast influence, and these originally 
Danish soldiers have at a later period, both as body-guards of 
the king and of the greater vassals, acted no unimportant part 
in the country. They were armed with axes, halberds, and swords 
inlaid with gold, and in purpose, descent, and equipment corre- 
sponded to the Warangian guard, in which the throne of the 
Byzantine emperors found its best security. In Cnut's time 
the number of these mercenaries was not very great, — being by 
some reckoned at three thousand, by others at six thousand, — 
but they were gathered under his banner from various nations, 
and consequently required the stricter discipline. Even a valiant 
Wendish prince, Gottschalk, the son of Udo, stayed long with 
Cnut in England, and gained the hand of a daughter of the royal 
house. Cnut himself appears rather as a sort of grand-master 



The Reign of Cnut 43 

of this military gild than as its commander, and it is said that, 
having in his anger slain one of the brotherhood in England, he 
submitted himself to its judgment in their assembly and paid 
a ninefold compensation. The degrading epithet of nithing, ap- 
plied to an expelled member of the gild, is an Anglo-Saxon word, 
which at a later period occurs in a way to render it extremely 
probable that the gild-law of the royal house-carls was in exist- 
ence after the Norman Conquest. 

§ 5. Cnut and the Church 

With the same prudence and the same success with which 
Cnut provided for the interests of the other classes, he protected 
also those of the clergy. Heathenism, which had held possession 
of many a lurking place in the popular belief of the Anglo-Saxons, 
and had again found entrance with the newly settled Danes, was 
strictly prohibited. Ecclesiastics were honored by him, many 
churches rebuilt, every monastery in England richly gifted, and 
some also in foreign countries, among which those of St. Omer's 
and Chartres were gladly surprised by costly presents; by simi- 
lar ones the chapter at Bremen was induced to pray for him 
under the Christian name of Lambert, for Queen Emma and for 
his son, Harthacnut; Cologne also received from him splendid 
psalters and choral books. He instituted the anniversaries of 
the sainted King Eadward and of St. Dunstan, and the remains 
of Archbishop ^Elfheah, who had been so barbarously murdered 
by his countrymen, he caused to be conveyed with the greatest 
pomp to Canterbury. In honor of St. Eadmund, the king and 
martyr, he caused the Benedictine monastery to be founded, or 
rather refounded at Bedericsworth, since called St. Edmundsbury, 
an undertaking through which, as well as by many of the measures 
above related, he might feel sure of gaining the good will of the 
Anglo-Saxons. The reestablishment of St. Peter's penny was 
a step which greatly raised him in the estimation of the higher 
clergy, and without injuring him in the eyes of the people, who 
no longer regarded as a foreign foe a king who from choice lived 
in the midst of them, protected their rights, honored their saints, 
and cultivated their language. Even Danish bishoprics he con- 
ferred on English ecclesiastics, among which may be named 
Scania on Bernhard, Fionia on Reinhere, Seeland or Roskilde 
on Gerbrand: a proceeding the less extraordinary, as St. Olaf, 
king of Norway, and Olaf of Sweden had also invited from 



44 English Historians 

England many excellent priests for the conversion of their sub- 
jects, as Sigefrith, Sigeward, and his brother's son Grimkil, 
Rodulf, Bernhard, and Wulfrith. . . . 

§ 6. CnuVs Journey to Rome and Letter to his People 

After some ten years' work in making sure his dominion, a 
period of tranquillity arrived in which Cnut was enabled to exe- 
cute without apprehension the wish which he had long cherished 
and often postponed, of making a pilgrimage to Rome. In the 
latter half of the year 1026 he left Denmark, whence he appears 
to have proceeded to Flanders, where, at St. Omer's, he was seen, 
and his penitence admired by the encomiast of Queen Emma. 
We also meet with him at Namur, where he trusted himself to 
Count Albert only against hostages, but with whom he after- 
wards entered on terms of friendship. During his whole progress 
he gave noble proofs of his munificence. Hence, passing through 
France and Burgundy, he reached the holy city where, besides 
other immunities, he obtained from Pope John the Nineteenth 
the exemption of the Saxon or English school from all taxes 
and tolls. After having visited all the chapels and churches in 
Middle Italy, he passed his Easter at Rome, in order to be present 
at the coronation of his friend and ally the Emperor Conrad the 
Second. It is probable that the marriage of their respective 
children was here settled. Of the other benefits acquired for 
his people by this journey an ample account is given in the fol- 
lowing letter, which he sent to England, while on his return to 
Denmark, by the hands of Living, abbot of Tavistock, and after- 
wards bishop of Crediton, and which we give entire as a picture 
of the age, and, perhaps, as a proof of an amended life as well 
as regal munificence. 

"Cnut, king of all England and Denmark, and of part of 
Sweden, to ^Ethelnoth the metropolitan, and iElfric of York, 
and to all bishops and primates, and to the whole nation of the 
English, both noble and ignoble, wishes health. I make known 
to you that I have lately been to Rome, to pray for the redemption 
of my sins, and for the prosperity of the kingdoms and peoples 
subject to my rule. This journey I had long ago vowed to God, 
though, through affairs of state and other impediments, had hith- 
erto been unable to perform it ; but I now humbly return thanks 
to God Almighty for having in my life granted me to yearn after 
the blessed apostles, Peter and Paul, and every sacred place within 



The Reign of Cnut 45 

and without the city of Rome, which I could learn of, and, accord- 
ing to my desire, personally to venerate and adore. And this 
I have executed chiefly because I had learned from wise men, 
that the holy apostle Peter had received from the Lord the great 
power of binding and loosing, and was key-bearer of the celestial 
kingdom; and I, therefore, deemed it extremely useful to desire 
his patronage before God. 

"Be it now known to you, that there was a great assembly of 
nobles at the Easter celebration, with the Lord Pope John, and 
the Emperor Conrad, to wit, all the princes of the nations from 
Mount Gargano to the nearest sea, who all received me honor- 
ably, and honored me with magnificent presents. But I have 
been chiefly honored by the emperor with divers costly gifts, 
as well in golden and silver vases as in mantles and vestments 
exceedingly precious. I have therefore spoken with the emperor 
and the lord pope, and the princes who were there, concerning 
the wants of all my people, both English and Danes, that a more 
equitable law and greater security might be granted to them in 
their journey to Rome, and that they might not be hindered by 
so many barriers, nor harassed by unjust tolls; and the emperor 
and King Rudolf, who has the greater number of those barriers 
in his dominions, have agreed to my demands ; and all the princes 
have engaged by their edict, that my men, whether merchants, 
or other travellers for objects of devotion, should go and return 
in security and peace, without any constraint of barriers or tolls. 

"I then complained to the lord pope, and said, that it greatly 
displeased me, that from my archbishops such immense sums of 
money were exacted, when, according to usage, they visited the 
apostolic see to receive the pall; and it was decreed that such 
exactions should not thenceforth be made. And all that I have 
demanded for the benefit of my people from the lord pope, from 
the emperor, from King Rudolf and from the other princes, through 
whose territories our way lies to Rome, they have freely granted, 
and also confirmed their cessions by oath, with the witness of 
four archbishops and twenty bishops, and an innumerable mul- 
titude of dukes and nobles, who were present; I therefore render 
great thanks to God Almighty that I have successfully accom- 
plished all that I desired, as I had proposed in my mind, and 
satisfied to the utmost the wishes of my people. Now then, be 
it known to you, that I have vowed, as a suppliant from hence- 
forth to justify in all things my whole life to God, and to rule the 
kingdoms and peoples subjected to me justly and piously, to 



46 English Historians 

maintain equal justice among all; and if, through the intemper- 
ance of my youth, or through negligence, I have done aught 
hitherto contrary to what is just, I intend with the aid of God to 
amend all. I therefore conjure and enjoin my counsellors, to 
whom I have intrusted the counsels of the kingdom, that from 
henceforth they in no wise, neither through fear of me nor favor 
to any powerful person, consent to, or suffer to increase any in- 
justice in my whole kingdom : I enjoin also all sheriffs and ' gere- 
fan' of my entire kingdom, as they would enjoy my friendship 
or their own security, that they use no unjust violence to any 
man, either rich or poor, but that every one, both noble and 
ignoble, enjoy just law, from which let them in no way swerve, 
neither for equal favor, nor for any powerful person, nor for the 
sake of collecting money for me, for I have no need that money 
should be collected for me by iniquitous exactions. 

"I therefore wish it to be made known to you, that, returning 
by the same way that I departed, I am going to Denmark, for 
the purpose of settling, with the counsel of all the Danes, firm and 
lasting peace with those nations, which, had it been in their power, 
would have deprived us of our life and kingdoms ; but were unable, 
God having deprived them of strength, who in his loving kindness 
preserves us in our kingdoms and honor, and renders naught 
the power of our enemies. Having made peace with the nations 
round us, and regulated and tranquillized all our kingdom here 
in the east, so that on no side we may have to fear war or enmities, 
I propose this summer, as soon as I can have a number of ships 
ready, to proceed to England ; but I have sent this letter beforehand, 
that all the people of my kingdom may rejoice at my prosperity; 
for, as you yourselves know, I have never shrunk from laboring, 
nor will I shrink therefrom, for the necessary benefit of all my 
people. I therefore conjure all my bishops and ealdormen, by 
the fealty which they owe to me and to God, so to order that, 
before I come to England, the debts of all, which we owe accord- 
ing to the old law, be paid; to wit, plough-alms, and a tithe of 
animals brought forth during the year, and the pence which ye 
owe to St. Peter at Rome, both from the cities and villages ; and, 
in the middle of August, a tithe of fruits, and at the feast of St. 
Martin, the first-fruits of things sown, to the church of the parish 
in which each one dwells, which is in English called ciric-sceat. 
If, when I come, these and others are not paid, he who is in fault 
shall be punished by the royal power severely and without any 
remission. Farewell." 



The Reign of Cnut 47 

Bibliographical Note 

Worsaae, An Account of the Danes and Norwegians in England, Scotland, 
and Ireland (1852), overemphasizes Danish influence. Ramsay, Foundations 
of England, Vol. I, chaps, xxiii-xxv. Hodgkin, A Political History of Eng- 
land to 1066, chap, xxiii. Green, Conquest of England. Larson, The 
King's Household in England Before the Norman Conquest, University of 
Wisconsin Publications, for Cnut's body-guard. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE ANGLO-SAXON ROYAL COUNCIL 

In Anglo-Saxon times the central government of the realm, 
in so far as it was organized at all, was vested in the king and his 
council, or Witan. The treatment of this council by Professor 
Freeman in his Norman Conquest is one of the best examples 
imaginable of the way in which the history of ancient institutions 
may be influenced by the modern theories. Writing at a time 
when English political philosophy was permeated with liberalism, 
Professor Freeman discovered a limited monarchy in the Anglo- 
Saxon period when the authority of kings depended on force, 
not law or custom; when no Englishman had ever thought of 
formal constitutional limitations on the crown; and when the 
ideas of modern political democracy were wholly impossible in 
theory or practice. The account given below should be com- 
pared with the treatment of the same subject in Mr. Chad wick's 
Anglo-Saxon Institutions. In conjunction with this, the stu- 
dent should examine the evidence in support of his theory which 
Professor Freeman has brought together in an Appendix to the 
first volume of his work. 

§ i. Composition of the Royal Council 1 

We may be sure that every Teutonic freeman had a voice in 
the Assembly — the Gemot, the Gemeinde, the Ekklesia — of his 
own mark. In fact, he in some sort retains it still, as holding 
his place in the parish vestry. He had a voice; it might be too 
much to say that he had a vote, for in an early state of things 
formal divisions are not likely to be often taken; the temper of 
the Assembly is found out by easier means. But the man who 

1 Freeman, History oj the Norman Conquest, Vol. I, chap. iii. By per- 
mission of the Delegates of the Clarendon Press, Oxford. 

48 



The Anglo-Saxon Royal Council 49 

clashed his arms to express approval, or who joined in the un- 
mistakable sound which expressed dissent, practically gave as 
efficient a vote as if he had solemnly walked out into a lobby. 
The Homeric A gore is the type of every such Assembly, and 
the likeness of the Homeric A gore may be seen in an English 
county-meeting to this day. 1 

The voice which the simple freeman, the ceorl, had in the As- 
sembly of his mark, he would not lose in the Assembly of his 
shire, the Scirgemot. The county court is to this day an assem- 
bly of all the freeholders of the shire. But the right of attending 
the Assembly of the shire would become really less valuable than 
the right of attending the Assembly of the mark. The larger the 
Assembly, the more distant the place of meeting, the more 
difficult, and therefore the more rare, does the attendance of 
individual members become, and the smaller is the importance of 
each individual member when he gets there. We cannot doubt 
that the Assemblies of the mark, of the shire, and of the kingdom 
all co-existed; but at each stage of amalgamation the competence 
of the inferior assembly would be narrowed. 

We cannot doubt that every freeman retained in theory the right 
of appearing in the Assembly of the kingdom, no less than in the 
Assemblies of the mark and of the shire. Expressions are found 
which are quite enough to show that the mass of the people were 
theoretically looked on as present in the National Assembly and 
as consenting to its decrees. But such a right of attendance 
necessarily became purely nugatory. The mass of the people 
could not attend, they would not care to attend, they would find 
themselves of no account if they did attend. They would there- 
fore, without any formal abrogation of their right, gradually cease 
from attending. The idea of representation had not yet arisen; 
those who did not appear in person had no means of appearing 
by deputy; of election or delegation there is not the slightest 
trace, though it might often happen that those who stayed away 
might feel that their rich or official neighbor who went would 
attend to their wishes and would fairly act in their interests. By 
this process an originally democratic assembly, without any for- 
mal exclusion of any class of its members, gradually shrank up 
into an aristocratic assembly. 

I trust that I have shown in another work how, under closely 

1 This was written before the local government acts, which reorganized 
the old system of county administration. 



$o English Historians 

analogous circumstances, the Federal Assembly of Achaia, legally 
open to every Achaian citizen, was practically attended only by 
those who were both rich and zealous, and how it often happened 
that the members of the inner body, the Senate, themselves alone 
formed the Assembly. In the same way an assembly of all the 
freemen of Wessex, when those freemen could not attend person- 
ally, and when they had no means of attending by representatives, 
gradually changed into an assembly attended by few or none but 
the king's thegns. The great officers of Church and State, ealdor- 
men, bishops, abbots, would attend; the ordinary thegns would 
attend more laxly, but still in considerable numbers; the king 
would preside; a few leading men would discuss; the general 
mass of the thegns, whether they formally voted or not, would 
make their approval or disapproval practically felt; no doubt 
the form still remained of at least announcing the resolutions taken 
to any of the ordinary freemen whom curiosity had drawn to the 
spot; most likely the form still remained of demanding their 
ceremonial assent, though without any fear that the habitual 
"Yea, yea," would ever be changed for "Nay, nay." It is thus 
that, in the absence of representation, a democratic franchise, 
as applied to a large country, gradually becomes unreal or delusive. 

A primary assembly, an Ekklesia, a Landesgemeinde, is an 
excellent institution in a commonwealth so small as to allow of 
its being really worked with effect. But in any large community 
it either becomes a tumultuous mob, like the later Roman Comitia 
or the Florentine Parliament, or else it gradually shrinks up into 
an aristocratic body, as the old Teutonic assemblies did both in 
England and on the Continent. When the great statesmen of 
the thirteenth century, Earl Simon and King Edward, fully es- 
tablished the principle of representation, they did but bring back 
the old state of things in another shape. The ordinary freeman 
had gradually lost his right of personal attendance in the National 
Assembly; it was expedient and impossible to restore that right 
to him in its original shape; he may be considered as having in 
the thirteenth century legally surrendered it, and as having re- 
ceived in its stead the far more practical right of attending by his 
representatives. 

Thus was formed that famous Assembly of our forefathers, 
called by various names the Mycel Gemot or Great Meeting, the 
Witenagemot or Meeting of the Wise, sometimes the Mycel Getheaht 
or Great Thought. But the common title of those who compose 
it is simply the Witan, the Sapientes, or Wise Men. In every 



The Anglo-Saxon Royal Council 51 

English kingdom we find the royal power narrowly limited by 
the necessity under which the king lay, of acting in all matters 
of importance by the consent and authority of his Witan ; in other 
words, of his Parliament. As the other kingdoms merged in 
Wessex, the Witan of the other kingdoms became entitled to seats 
in the Gemot of Wessex, now become the great Gemot of the 
empire. But just as in the case of the Assemblies of the mark and 
the shire, so the Gemots of the other kingdoms seem to have gone 
on as local bodies, dealing with local affairs, and perhaps giving 
a formal assent to the resolutions of the central body. 

As to the constitution of these great councils in any English 
kingdom, our information is of the vaguest kind. The members 
are always described in the loosest way. We find the Witan 
constantly assembling, constantly passing laws, but we find no 
law prescribing or defining the constitution of the Assembly itself. 
We find no trace of representation or election; we find no trace 
of any property qualification ; we find no trace of nomination by 
the crown, except in so far as all the great officers of the court 
and the kingdom were constantly present. On the other hand, we 
have seen that all the leading men, ealdormen, bishops, abbots, 
and a considerable body of other thegns, did attend; we have 
seen that the people as a body were in some way associated with 
the legislative acts of their chiefs, that those acts were in some 
sort the acts of the people themselves , to which they had themselves 
assented, and were not merely the edicts of superiors which they 
had to obey. There is no doubt that, on some particular occa- 
sions, some classes at least of the people did actually take a part 
in the proceedings of the National Council; thus the citizens of 
London are more than once recorded to have taken a share in 
the election of kings. 

No theory that I know of will explain all these phenomena 
except that which I have just tried to draw out. This is, that 
every freeman had an abstract right to be present, but that any 
actual participation in the proceedings of the Assembly had, 
gradually and imperceptibly, come to be confined to the leading 
men, to the king's thegns, strengthened under peculiarly favor- 
able circumstances, by the presence of exceptional classes of free- 
men, like the London citizens. It is therefore utterly vain for 
any political party to try to press the supposed constitution of 
our ancient National Councils into the service of modern political 
warfare. The Meeting of the Wise has not a word to utter for 
or against any possible reform bill. In one sense it was more 



^2 English Historians 

democratic than anything that the most advanced Liberal would 
venture to dream of; in another sense it was more oligarchic 
than anything that the most unbending Conservative would venture 
to defend. Yet it may in practice have fairly represented the 
wishes of the nation ; and if so, no people ever enjoyed more com- 
plete political freedom than the English did in these early times. 
For the powers of the ancient Witenagemot surpassed beyond all ■ 
measure the powers which our written law vests in a modern 
Parliament. In some respects they surpassed the powers which 
our conventional constitution vests in the House of Commons. 

§ 2. Power of Witan in Election and Deposition oj Kings 

The king could do absolutely nothing without the consent 
of his Wise Men. First of all, it was from them that he derived 
his political being, and it was on them that he depended for its 
continuance. The Witan chose the king and the Witan could 
depose him. The power of deposition is a power which, from 
its very nature, can be exercised but rarely; we therefore do not 
find many kings deposed by act of Parliament either before or 
since the Norman Conquest. But we do find instances, both 
before and since that event, which show that, by the ancient con- 
stitution of England, the Witan of the land did possess the right 
of deposing the sovereign, and that on great and emergent occasions 
they did not shrink from exercising that right. I will not attempt 
to grapple with the confused history of Northumberland, where 
at one time kings were set up and put down almost daily. Such 
revolutions were doubtless as much the result of force as of any 
legal process ; still we can hardly doubt that the legal forms were 
commonly observed, and sometimes we find it distinctly recorded 
that they were. 

Let us confine ourselves to the better-attested history of the 
line of Cerdic. Five times, — we might more truly say six times, 
— thrice before and twice since the Norman Conquest, has 
the king of the West-Saxons or of the English been deprived 
of his kingly office by the voice of his Parliament. Sigeberht of 
Wessex, in the eighth century, was deposed by the vote of the 
General Assembly of his kingdom, and another king was elected 
in his stead. /Ethelred the Second was deposed by one act of the 
legislature and restored by another. Harthacnut, in the like 
sort, was deposed, while still uncrowned, from his West-Saxon 
kingdom, though he was afterwards reelected to the whole kingdom 



The Anglo-Saxon Royal Council 53 

of England. Edward the Second was deposed by Parliament; 
so was Richard the Second. At a later time the Parliament of 
England shrank from the formal deposition of James the Second, 
and took refuge in a theory of abdication which, though logically 
absurd, practically did all that was wanted. But the Parliament 
of Scotland had no such scruples, and that body, in full conformity 
with ancient principles, declared the crown of Scotland to be for- 
feited. In a land where everything goes by precedent, a right 
resting on a tradition like this, though its actual exercise may have 
taken place only five or six times in nine hundred years, is surely 
as well established as any other. Under our modern constitution 
the right is likely to remain dormant. The objects which in past 
times required the deposition of the king, if not from his office, 
at least from his authority, can now be obtained by a parliamentary 
censure of the prime minister, or in the extremest case by bringing 
an impeachment against him. 

If the Witan could depose the king, still more undoubtedly 
did the Witan elect the king. It is strange how people's eyes 
are blinded on this subject. It is not uncommon to hear people 
talk about the times before and shortly after the Norman Con- 
quest as if the Act for the Settlement of the Royal Succession had 
already been in force in those days. It is strange to hear a num- 
ber of princes, both before and since the Conquest, popularly 
spoken of as the "usurpers," merely because they came to the 
crown in a different way from that which modern law and custom 
prescribe. It is strange that people who talk in this way commonly 
forget that their own principle, so far as it proves anything, proves 
a great deal more than they intend. If Harold, Stephen, John, 
were usurpers, Alfred and Eadward the Confessor were usurpers 
just as much. Alfred and Eadward, no less than John, suc- 
ceeded by election to the exclusion of nephews whom the modern 
law of England would look upon as the undoubted heirs of the 
crown. All this sounds very strange to any one who understands 
our early history ; but it may in some cases be the result of simple 
ignorance. It is stranger still to hear others talk as if hereditary 
succession, according to some particular theory of it, was a divine 
and eternal law which could not be departed from without sin. 
Those who talk in this way should at least tell us what the divine 
and immutable law of succession is, for in a purely historical 
view of things nearly every kingdom seems to have a law of suc- 
cession of its own. Our forefathers, at any rate, knew nothing of 
such superstitions. 



54 English Historians 

The ancient English kingship was elective. It was elective 
in the same sense in which all the old Teutonic kingdoms were 
elective. Among a people in whose eyes birth was highly valued, 
it was deemed desirable that the king should be the descendant 
of illustrious and royal ancestors. In the days of heathendom 
it was held that the king should come of the supposed stock of 
the gods. These feelings everywhere pointed to some particular 
house as the royal house, as the house whose members had a spe- 
cial claim on the suffrages of the electors. In every kingdom there 
was a royal family, out of which alone, under all ordinary circum- 
stances, kings were chosen; but within that royal family the 
Witan of the land had a free choice. The eldest son of the last 
king would doubtless always have a preference; if he was him- 
self at all worthy of the place, if his father's memory was at all 
cherished, he would commonly be preferred without hesitation, 
probably chosen without the appearance of any other candidate. 

But a preference was all to which he was entitled, and he seems 
not to have been entitled even to a preference unless he was actu- 
ally the son of a crowned king. If he were too young or otherwise 
disqualified, the electors passed him by and chose some worthier 
member of the royal family. Alfred and Eadred were chosen 
in preference to the minor sons of elder brothers. Eadward the 
Confessor was chosen in preference to the absent son of an elder 
brother. At the death of Eadgar, when the royal family contained 
only minors to choose from, the electors were divided between the 
elder and the younger brother. Minors passed by at one time 
might or might not be elected at a later vacancy. ^Ethelwold, the 
son of yEthelred the First, who had been passed by in favor of 
his uncle Alfred, was again passed by in Alfred's death because 
no claim could compare with that of Eadward, the worthy son 
of the most glorious of fathers. The children of Eadmund were 
passed by in favor of their uncle Eadred, but on Eadred's death 
the choice fell on the formerly excluded Eadwig. And as a certain 
preference was acquired by birth, a certain preference was acquired 
by the recommendation of the late king. So Eadgar recommended 
his elder son Eadward to the electors ; so Eadward the Confessor 
recommended Harold. TEthelwulf had long before attempted, 
by the help of a will confirmed by the Witan, to establish a peculiar 
law of succession, which soon broke down. But it is clear that 
a certain importance was attached to the wishes of a deceased 
and respected king as conveying a distinct preference. But it 
conveyed nothing more than a preference ; the person who enjoyed 



The Anglo-Saxon Royal Council 55 

this advantage, whether by birth or nomination, could still be 
passed by without breach of constitutional right. From these 
principles it follows that, as any disqualified person in the royal 
family might be passed by, so, if the whole family were disqualified, 
the whole family might be passed by. That is to say, the election 
of Harold, the son of Godwine, the central point of this history, was 
perfectly good in every point of view. The earlier election of Cnut 
was equally good in point of form; only it was an election under 
duresse — duresse a little, but not much, stronger than that under 
which an English chapter elects its bishop. 

§ 3. Share oj the Witan in the Government of the Realm 

An ancient English king was then, as his very title implied, not 
the father of his people, but their child, their creation. And the 
Assembly which had elected him, and which could depose him, 
claimed to direct him by its advice and authority in almost every 
exercise of the kingly power. Every act of government of any 
importance was done, not by the king alone, but by the king and 
his Witan. The great council of the nation had its active share 
even in those branches of government which modern constitutional 
theories mark out as the special domain of the executive. That 
laws were ordained and taxes imposed by the authority of the 
Witan, that they sat as the highest court for the trial of exalted 
and dangerous offenders, is only what we should look for from the 
analogy of modern times. It is more important to find that the 
king and his Witan, and not the king alone, concluded treaties, 
made grants of iolkland, ordained the assemblage of fleets and 
armies, appointed and deposed the great officers of Church and 
State. Of the exercise of all these powers by the assembled 
Witan we shall find abundant examples in the course of this history. 

Now these are the very powers which a modern House of Com- 
mons shrinks from directly exercising. These are the powers 
which, under our present system, Parliament prefers to intrust 
to ministers in whom it has confidence — ministers whom it virtu- 
ally appoints, and whom it can virtually dismiss without any 
formal ceremony of deposition. And, in our present state of 
things, little or no harm and some direct good comes from Parlia- 
ment preferring an indirect course of action on these subjects. 
But in an earlier state of things, a more direct agency of the Par- 
liament or other National Assembly is absolutely necessary. The 
Assembly has to deal not with a ministry whom it can create and 



56 English Historians 

destroy without any formal action, but with a personal king 
whom it has indeed elected and whom it can depose, but whose 
election and deposition are solemn national acts, his deposition 
indeed being the rarest and most extreme of all national acts. 
In such a state of things the power of the king may be strictly 
limited by law ; but within the limits which the law prescribes to 
him he acts according to his own will and pleasure, or accord- 
ing to the advice of counsellors who are purely of his own 
choosing. 

In such a state of things the king and the nation are brought 
face to face, and it is needful that the National Assembly should 
have a more direct control over affairs than is at all needful when 
the ingenious device of a responsible ministry is interposed be- 
tween king and Parliament. Long after the days of our ancient 
Witenagemots, in the days of Edward the Third, for instance, Par- 
liament was consulted about wars and negotiations in a much 
more direct way than it is now. The control of Parliament over 
the executive is certainly not less effective now than it was then; 
but the nature of our present system makes it desirable that the 
control of Parliament should be exercised in a less direct way than 
it was then. Our present system avoids, above all things, all 
possibility of direct personal collision between Parliament and 
the sovereign. But such direct personal collisions form the 
staple of English history from the thirteenth century onwards. 
In earlier times we seldom come across any record of the de- 
bates, though we often know the determinations of our National 
Councils. 

How far such collisions commonly took place in early times we 
have but small means of knowing. They were perhaps less to be 
expected than they were some centuries later. The Plantagenet 
kings had to deal with their Parliaments as with something ex- 
ternal to themselves, something which laid petitions before them 
which they could accept or reject at pleasure. A struggle in those 
days was a struggle between the king and an united Parliament. 
Nowadays, as we all know, the struggle takes place within the walls 
of Parliament itself. But we can well believe that, in this respect 
as in so many others, the earliest times were really more like our 
own than the intermediate centuries were. 

An ancient Witenagemot did not petition, it decreed; it con- 
firmed the acts of the king which, without the assent of the Witan, 
had no validity; it was not a body external to the king, but a body 
of which the king was the head in a mucfi more direct sense than 



The Anglo-Saxon Royal Council 57 

he could be said to be the head of a later medieval Parliament. 
The king and his Witan acted together; the king could do nothing 
without the Witan, and the Witan could do nothing without the 
king; they were no external, half-hostile body; they were his 
own Council, surrounding and advising him. Direct collisions be- 
tween the king on the one hand and an united Gemot on the other 
were not likely to be common. This is indeed mere conjecture, 
but it is a conjecture to which the phenomena of the case seem 
inevitably to lead us. But of the great powers of the Witena- 
gemot, of its direct participation in all important acts of government, 
there can be no doubt at all. The fact is legibly written in every 
page of our early history. 

§ 4. Antiquity oj English Liberties 

The vast increase of the power of the crown after the Norman 
Conquest, the gradual introduction of a systematic feudal juris- 
prudence, did much to lessen the authority and dignity of the 
National Councils. The idea of a nation and its chief, of a king 
and his counsellors, almost died away; the king became half 
despot, half mere feudal lord. England was never without 
National Assemblies of some kind or other, but from the Conquest 
in the eleventh century till the second birth of freedom in the 
thirteenth, our National Assemblies do not stand out in the same 
distinct and palpable shape in which they stand out both in earlier 
and in later times. Here again we owe our thanks to those illus- 
trious worthies, from the authors of the Great Charter onwards, 
who, in so many ways, won back for us our ancient constitution in 
another shape. I have said that no political party can draw any 
support for its own peculiar theories from that obscurest of sub- 
jects, the constitution of the Witenagemot. But no lover of our 
historic liberties can see without delight how venerable a thing 
those liberties are, how vast and how ancient are the rights and 
powers of an English Parliament. Our ancient Gemots enjoyed 
every power of a modern Parliament, together with some powers 
which modern Parliaments shrink from claiming. Even such a 
matter of detail as the special security granted to the persons of 
members of the two houses has been traced, and not without 
a show of probability, to an enactment which stands at the very 
front of English secular jurisprudence, the second among the laws 
ordained by our first Christian king and the Witan of his kingdom 
of Kent. 



5 8 English Historians 

§ 5. Importance 0} the Personal Character of the King 

As the powers of the Witan were thus extensive, as the king 
could do no important act of government without their consent, 
some may hastily leap to the conclusion that an ancient English 
king was a mere puppet in the hands of the National Council. 
No inference could be more mistaken. Nothing is clearer in 
our earlier history than the personal agency of the king in every- 
thing that is done, and the unspeakable difference between a good 
and a bad king. The truth is that in an early state of society 
almost everything depends on the personal character of the king. 
An able king is practically absolute ; under a weak king the govern- 
ment falls into utter anarchy and chaos. Change the scene, as 
we shall presently do in our narrative, from the days of Eadgar to 
those of yEthelred; change it again from the long, dreary, hopeless 
reign of ^thelred to the few months of superhuman energy which 
form the reign of the hero Eadmund ; compare the nine months of 
Harold with the two months which followed his fall, and we shall 
see how the whole fate of the nation turned upon the personal 
character of its sovereign. 

With such witnesses before us, we can the better understand how 
our forefathers would have scouted the idea — if the idea had 
ever occurred to them — of risking the destiny of the nation on 
the accidents of strict hereditary succession, and how wisely 
they determined that the king must be, if not the worthiest of 
the nation, at any rate the worthiest of the royal house. The un- 
happy reign of ^Ethelred showed the bad side of even that limited 
application of the hereditary principle which was all that they 
admitted. Under her great kings, England had risen from her 
momentary overthrow to an imperial dominion. At home she 
possessed a strong and united government, and her position in the 
face of other nations was one which made her alliance to be 
courted by the foremost princes of Europe. The accession of 
the minor son of Eadgar, a child who, except in his crimes and 
vices, never went beyond childhood, dragged down the glorious 
fabric into the dust, so greatly did national welfare and national 
misfortune depend on the personal character of the king. 

The king, it is true, could do nothing without his Witan, but as 
his Witan could do nothing without him, he was not a shadow or 
a puppet, but a most important personal agent. He was no more a 
puppet than the leader of the House of Commons is a puppet. 
We may be sure that the king and his immediate advisers always 



The Anglo-Saxon Royal Council 59 

had a practical initiative, and that the body of the Witan did 
little but accept or reject their proposals. We may be sure that a 
king fit for his place, an Alfred or an /Ethelstan, met with nothing 
that could be called opposition, but wielded the Assembly at his 
will. Princes invested with far smaller constitutional powers than 
those of an ancient English king have become the ruling spirits 
of commonwealths which denied them any sort of independent 
action. 

When a great king sat upon the West-Saxon throne we may be 
sure that, while every constitutional form was strictly observed, 
the votes of the Witan were guided in everything by the will of 
the king. But when the king had no will, or a will which the 
Witan could not consent to, then of course the machine gave way 
and nothing was to be seen but confusion and every evil work. 
Again, the king was not only the first mover, he was also the main 
doer of everything. The Witan decreed, but it was the king who 
carried out their decrees. Weighty as was the influence of his 
personal character on the nature of the resolutions to be passed, 
its influence was weightier still on the way in which those resolu- 
tions were to be carried out. Under a good king, council and 
execution went hand in hand ; under a weak or wicked king, there 
was no place found for either. Sometimes disgraceful resolutions 
were passed; sometimes wise and good resolutions were never 
carried into effect. The Witan unpler ^thelred sometimes voted 
money to buy off the Danes ; sometimes they voted armies to fight 
against them; but, with ^thelred to carry out the decrees, it 
mattered little what the decrees were. 

Add to all this the enormous influence which attached to the king 
from his having all the chief men of the land bound to him by the 
personal tie of thegnship. He was the Cyne-hlajord, at once the 
king of the nation and the personal lord of each individual. 
Though his grants of folkland and his nominations to the highest 
offices required the assent of the Witan, yet in these matters, above 
all, his initiative would be undoubted; the Witan had only to 
confirm and they would seldom be tempted to reject the proposals 
which the king laid before them. He was not less the fountain 
of honor and the fountain of wealth, because in the disposal of 
both he had certain decent ceremonies to go through. Add to all 
this, that in unsettled times there is a special chance, both of acts 
of actual oppression which the law is not strong enough to redress, 
and of acts of energy beyond the law which easily win popular 
condonation in the case of a victorious and beloved monarch. 



60 English Historians 

Altogether, narrowly limited as were the legal powers of an ancient 
English king, his will, or lack of will, had the main influence on the 
destinies of the nation, and his personal character was of as much 
moment to the welfare of the State as the personal character of an 
absolute ruler. 

Bibliographical Note 

Kemble, Saxons in England, Vol. II, chaps, i and vi, exaggerates 
the importance of the Witan. Stubbs, Constitutional History of England, 
chap, vi, based largely on Kemble. Chad wick, Studies in Anglo-Saxon 
Institutions (1905), chap, ix and Excursus IV. 



PART II 

FEUDALISM AND NATIONALISM 

CHAPTER I 

THE MEN OF LONDON AND THE CORONATION OF WILLIAM THE 

CONQUEROR 

The Norman Conquest is one of the most striking events in 
English history, and doubtless it constituted one of the greatest 
crises in that history, in so far as it brought England into closer 
contact with continental life and ecclesiastical polity and gave the 
nation a stronger and better-organized central government. It is 
difficult to determine, however, just what precise results are to be 
attributed to that Conquest. Life in town and country probably 
flowed along in the old course, and a strong king might have been 
evolved from among the contending princes after Edward the 
Confessor's death. Such speculation is nevertheless idle, as William 
of Normandy determined to secure the crown for himself, and, 
armed by the pope's sanction, he and his followers struck the 
first blow for the throne at the battle of Hastings. Not long 
afterwards the metropolis of the realm yielded to the conqueror. 

§ i. The Conqueror's Preparations for the Capture of London 1 

The men of London, whose forefathers had beaten back Swegen 
and Cnut, whose brothers had died around the standard of Harold, 
were not men to surrender their mighty city, defended by its 
broad river and its Roman walls, without at least meeting the 
invader in the field. William, master of Dover, Canterbury, and 

1 Freeman, History of the Norman Conquest, Vol. Ill, chap. xvi. By 
permission of the Delegates of the Clarendon Press, Oxford. 

61 



6i English Historians 

Winchester, now directed his march along the old Roman road, 
directly on the great city. He marched on, ravaging, burning, 
and slaughtering as he went, and drew near to the southern bank 
of the river. One account seems to describe him as occupying 
Westminster, — therefore as crossing the river, — as planting 
his military engines by St. Peter's minster, and as beginning, or 
at least threatening, a formal siege of the city. But nothing in 
the whole story is plainer than that William did not cross the river 
till long after. A more credible version represents him as send- 
ing before him a body of five hundred knights, whether simply to 
reconnoitre or in the hope of gaining anything by a sudden attack. 
The citizens sallied ; a skirmish followed ; the English were beaten 
back within the walls; the southern suburb of the city, South- 
wark, where Godwine had waited in his own house for the gather- 
ing of two memorable assemblies, was given to the flames. The 
pride of the citizens was supposed to be somewhat lowered by this 
twofold blow ; but it is plain that William did not yet venture any 
direct attack on the city. His ships were far away, and the bridge 
of London would have been a spot even less suited for an onslaught 
of Norman cavalry than the hillside of Senlac. He trusted to the 
gradual working of fear and of isolation even on the hearts of 
those valiant citizens. 

He kept on the right bank of the Thames, harrying as he went, 
through Surrey, Hampshire, and Berkshire, till at Wallingford a 
ford and a bridge supplied safe and convenient means of crossing 
for his army. He was now in the shire of the brave sheriff Godric, 
in a king's town, part of which seems to have been set aside as a 
sort of special barrack or garrison for the king's house-carls. But 
the stout heart of the Lord of Fifhide had ceased to beat ; sheriff 
and house-carls alike had dealt their last blow for England on 
the far South Saxon hill. No force was ready on the bridge of 
Wallingford to bar the approach of the invader. There is even 
reason to think that the chief man of the place, perhaps the sheriff 
of the neighboring shire of Oxford, Wiggod of Wallingford, fa- 
vored the progress of the invader. He had been in high favor 
with Eadward, and was afterwards in high favor with William, 
and a son of his lived to die fighting for William in a more worthy 
cause. However this may be, William passed the great border 
stream unhindered, and for the first time set foot on Mercian soil. 

He was now on the old battle-ground of Bensington, whence 
Angle and Saxon, now being fast united in one common bondage, 
had in other days fought out their border quarrels. He passed 



The Coronation of William the Conqueror 63 

beneath the hills, so marked in the distance by their well-known 
clumps, where the Briton had, in earlier days, bid defiance to the 
conquerors of the world. He was now within the diocese whence 
the voice of England had driven his unworthy countryman, the 
Norman Ulf, the bishop who did naught bishoplike.. He was 
now within the earldom which his own hand had made vacant, 
when he avenged the fall of his Spanish horse by the fall of a son 
of Godwine. But he still did not march straight upon London. 
His plan evidently was to surround the city with a wide circle of 
conquered and desolated country, till sheer isolation should compel 
its defenders to submit. South and west of London he was master 
from Dover to Wallingford ; his course was now to march on, keep- 
ing at some distance from the city till the lands north and east of 
London should be as thoroughly wasted and subdued as the lands 
south of the Thames. He followed out this plan till he reached 
Berkhampstead in Hertfordshire. But by this time the spirit of 
London itself had failed. The blow which had been dealt at 
Senlac had at last reached the heart of England. At Berkhamp- 
stead the second act of William's great work was played out. The 
Conquest there received the formal ratification of the conquered. 

§ 2. London Negotiates with the Conqueror 

The chief military command in London was in the hands of the 
wounded staller Esegar, the sheriff of the Middle-Saxons. His 
wound was so severe that he could neither walk nor ride, but was 
carried about the city in a litter. But he is spoken of as being 
the soul of all the counsels taken by the defenders of London. 
The defection of the Northern earls had left him the layman of 
highest rank in the city, the natural protector and military adviser 
of the young king-elect. A tale is told of messages which are 
said to have gone to and fro between Esegar and William. But 
it is hard to know how far we ought to believe a story which im- 
plies that London was besieged by William, which it certainly was 
not. William, we are told, sent a secret message to Esegar. He 
asked only for a formal acknowledgment of his right. Let Will- 
iam have the name of king, and all things in the kingdom should 
be ruled according to the bidding of the sheriff of the Middle- 
Saxons. Esegar listens ; he has no intention of yielding even thus 
far, but he thinks it prudent to dissemble. He summons an As- 
sembly, among the members of which we may possibly discern the 
forerunners of the famous aldermen of London. He sets forth 



64 English Historians 

the general sad state of the country and the special dangers of the 
besieged city. It would be prudent to send a cunning messenger 
who should entrap the invader with wily words. Let him offer a 
feigned submission, which might at least cause delay and stave off 
the immediate danger. The messenger went; but to deceive 
William was found to be no such easy matter. The fox — it is 
his own poetical panegyrist who makes the comparison — is 
not to be caught in a trap laid in open day. William pretends 
to accept the proposals of Esegar, the exact details of which are 
not told us. But he wins over the messenger by crafty speeches, 
backed by gifts and by promises greater than the gifts. The 
messenger goes back to London to enlarge on the might, the wis- 
dom, the just rights, and the various excellencies of William. 
The invader is one whom it is on every ground hopeless to resist. 
His intentions are friendly; he offers peace to the city; wisdom 
dictates one course only, that of immediate submission to such a 
candidate for the kingdom. The people applaud, the Senate 
approves ; both orders — their distinct action is clearly marked — 
vote at once to forsake the cause of the young ^Etheling, and to 
make their submission to the conquering duke. 

Whatever truth there may be in this story, it is certain that a 
resolution to the same effect as that described by the poet was act- 
ually come to within the walls of London. While William was 
at Berkhampstead, an embassy came to submit and to do homage 
to him — an embassy which might be fairly looked upon as having 
a right to speak in the name of at least Southern England. Thither 
came Eadgar, a king deposed before he was full king. Thither 
came the metropolitan of York, perhaps also the metropolitan 
of Canterbury. Thither came at least two other bishops, Wulf- 
stan of Worcester and Walter of Hereford, and with them came 
the best men of London, and many other of the chief men of Eng- 
land. And on a sad and shameful errand they came. They 
came to make their submission to the invader and to pray him 
to accept the crown of England. The defection of the Northern 
earls, the terror struck into men's hearts by William's ravages, had 
done their work. They bowed to him for need. Hard, indeed, 
the need was, but the need stared them in the face ; men of cold 
wisdom even said that they ought to have bowed to William long 
before. They sware oaths to him and gave him hostages. 

William received his new subjects graciously ; to the young rival 
who had so easily fallen before him he was specially gracious. 
The kiss of peace was given by the Conqueror to Eadgar and to 



The Coronation of William the Conqueror 65 

his companions, and he pledged his word that he would be a good 
lord to them. Such a submission on the part of so many men of 
such lofty rank might of itself be deemed equivalent to an election 
to the crown. But a more direct requisition seems not to have 
been wanting. It was probably at Berkhampstead that William 
was, as we are told, prayed by the chief men of England, spiritual 
and temporal, to accept the vacant crown. They needed a king; 
they had always been used to submit to a crowned king and to 
none other. Here we may clearly see the almost superstitious 
importance which was then attached to the ceremony of coronation. 
The uncrowned Eadgar had been no full king, and he had been 
unable to defend his people. The armed candidate who was 
encamped at Berkhampstead was no longer to be withstood by 
force of arms. The best course was to acknowledge and receive 
him at once, and by the mystic rite of consecration to change him 
from a foreign invader into an English king. 

We must bear in mind that men were living who could remember 
how an earlier foreign invader had been changed into an English 
king, into a king who had won his place among the noblest of Eng- 
land's native worthies. England had accepted Cnut the Dane, 
and she had flourished under him as she had never flourished before 
or since. Men might hope that the like good luck would follow on 
their acceptance of William the. Norman. W r illiam, in truth, prom- 
ised better than Cnut in every way. Instead of a half-beaten sea- 
king, he was the model prince of Europe, the valiant soldier, the 
wise ruler, the pious son of the Church, the prince who, among 
unparalleled difficulties, had raised his paternal duchy to a state of 
prosperity and good government which made it the wonder and the 
envy of continental lands. The hopes of those who dreamed that 
William would prove a second Cnut were doomed to be woefully 
disappointed. But such hopes were at the time, if not unreason- 
able, at all events plausible. It is easy to understand how men 
may have been led away by them. Men, too, especially churchmen, 
might easily argue that the event had proved that it was God's 
will that William should be received. Harold had appealed to 
God's judgment upon the field of battle, and the verdict of God's 
judgment had been given against him. Those who had fought 
under the banner of the Fighting Man against the banner of the 
Apostle were proved to have been in truth men fighting against God. 

All these arguments, backed by the presence in the land of 
William's victorious army, would have their effect upon men's 
minds. We can even understand that they might produce some- 



66 English Historians 

thing more than a mere sullen submission to physical force. We 
can understand that men may have brought themselves to a belief, 
unwilling indeed, but not either absolutely compulsory or abso- 
lutely hypocritical, that the king who had been so visibly sent to 
them by the hand of God ought to be frankly and loyally acknowl- 
edged. We can believe that the request made by so many Eng- 
lishmen that the Conqueror would at once assume the English 
crown was made in an artificial but not a dishonest frame of 
mind. It was made in that state of artificial hope, even of artificial 
eagerness, which is not uncommon in men who are striving to 
make the best of a bad bargain. For the moment they really 
wished for William as their king. But it was only for the moment 
that the wish lasted. 

§ 3. William Accepts the Crown oj England 

The crown was thus offered to William, but we are told that it 
was by no means eagerly accepted by him. He summoned a Coun- 
cil of his chief officers and advisers — we are hardly to suppose 
a Norman military Gemot — and laid the matter before them. 
Possibly he merely wished to prove the minds of his friends and 
followers; possibly the arguments which they brought forward 
had real weight with him. Was it, he asked, expedient for him 
to take the crown, while he was still so far from being in complete 
possession of the kingdom? We must remember that though 
the prelates of York, Worcester, and Hereford were in William's 
camp, yet York, Worcester, and Hereford were not in William's 
hands. William had actual possession only of the South- 
eastern shires. His authority reached westward as far as Winches- 
ter, northward as far as his plunderers could go from the spot 
where he was now encamped. Was it prudent then, he argued, 
so hastily to assume a kingship which, in the greater part of the 
land, would still be kingship only in name ? He wished, moreover, 
— and here we may believe that William spoke from the heart, — 
that whenever he should be raised into a crowned king, his be- 
loved and faithful duchess might be there to share his honors. 
He asked, then, the opinion of the Assembly as to the immediate 
acceptance of the crown which was pressed upon him. 

The military Council was strongly in favor of William's 
acceptance of the crown, but the decisive answer was given, not 
by any of William's native subjects, but by one of the most 
eminent of the foreign volunteers. Hamon, Viscount of Thouars, 



The Coronation of William the Conqueror 67 

a man, we are told, as ready of speech as he was valiant in fight, 
had, on the height of Telham, been the first to hail the duke as 
a future king. He was not unwilling that the words which had 
then fallen from him as an omen should now assume full shape and 
substance. The Aquitanian chief began in a courtly strain by 
praising the condescension of the general who deigned to take 
the opinion of his soldiers on such a point. It was not, he 
said, a matter for much deliberation, when all were united in one 
wish. It was the desire of every man in William's army to see 
his lord become a king as soon as might be. To make William 
a king, was the very object for which all of them had crossed the 
sea; the object for which they had exposed themselves to the 
dangers of the deep and of the battle. As for England itself, 
the wisest men in England, the highest in rank and character, 
were there, offering the kingship of their land to William. They 
doubtless knew best what was for the good of their own country. 
They clearly saw in William a fit man to reign over them, one under 
whose rule themselves and their country would flourish. An offer 
thus pressed on him from all sides it was clearly his duty to accept. 
William, we are told, weighed what was said, and determined at 
once to accept the crown. He felt that, if he were once crowned 
king, the magic of the royal name would have its effect. It 
would do something to damp the spirit of resistance in the still 
unsubdued portions of the country. Men who were eager to 
fight against a mere foreign invader, would be less inclined 
to withstand a king formally chosen and consecrated according to 
the laws of the kingdom. The Duke of the Normans therefore 
signified to the English embassy his readiness at once to assume 
the kingship of England. The day for the consecration of the 
king-elect was of course fixed for the great Festival of the Church 
which was drawing near. The Midwinter Feast was to be again 
held at Westminster by a crowned king. On the Feast of the 
Nativity, within less than a full year from the consecration of the 
minster itself, the Church of Eadward was to behold another 
king crowned and anointed within its walls. Events had indeed 
followed fast on one another since the Christmas Gemot of the 
last year had been held by the last king of the House of Cerdic. 

§ 4. Preparations for the Coronation 

The Conqueror was thus king-elect. His plans had answered. 
His arts and his arms had been alike successful. And the triumph 



68 English Historians 

of his subtlety had been specially his own. It was the chance shot 
of an arrow which had overcome the English king; but it was 
William's own policy which had overcome the English people. 
King in truth only by the edge of the sword, he had so managed 
matters that he had now the formal right to call himself king, not 
only by the bequest of Eadward, but by the election of the English 
people. But having won this great success of his craft, he was not 
inclined to jeopard what he had won by the neglect of any needful 
military precaution. He did not trust himself in London till his 
position there was secured, till some steps had been taken towards 
holding the lofty spirit of the citizens in check. He sent on a de- 
tachment before him to prepare a fortress in or close to the city. 
This was doubtless one of those hasty structures of wood of which 
we have heard at Brionne and at Arques ; but it was the germ which 
grew into the noblest work of Norman military art, the mighty 
Tower of Gundulf. Orders were also sent to make everything 
ready for the reception of the new king and for the great ceremony 
of his inauguration. 

Of William's conduct meanwhile two exactly opposite pictures 
are given us by the Norman and by the English writers. His pane- 
gyrist tells us that all was quiet and peaceful; as there were no 
longer any human foes to be slaughtered, W 7 illiam could carry on 
his favorite warfare with the denizens of the air and of the forest. 
The English writers, on the other hand, tell us how, notwithstand- 
ing the submission of his new subjects, notwithstanding his own 
promises to them, the king-elect still allowed his soldiers to harry 
the country and burn the towns. There is probably truth in both 
accounts. William had no longer any motive for systematic 
ravages, such as he had been guilty of before and after the battle. 
No records of any devastations in Hertfordshire remain, such as the 
records which we have seen of his devastations in Sussex. But we 
have seen also, from what happened at Dover, how hard it was to 
control men, many of whom doubtless thought that whatever was 
left to an Englishman was something taken from themselves. We 
have seen also that, from whatever cause, William, though he 
indemnified the sufferers, failed to punish the criminals. We may 
believe that something of this sort took place now. Systematic 
ravages, carried on by the Duke's order, doubtless stopped, but 
the excesses of the army, the amount of burning and plundering 
done without his order, but which he failed to check or to punish, 
was doubtless considerable. 

From Berkhampstead to London, whatever was the amount 



The Coronation of William the Conqueror 69 

of damage done by the way, William marched on without oppo- 
sition. When the preparations which were to keep the city in 
subjection were completed, William drew near in readiness for 
the great rite which was to change the Conqueror into a king. 
As to the place of the ceremony, there can be no doubt. William 
was to be crowned in the church which had been reared by his 
kinsman and predecessor, and where his mortal remains, lifeless, 
yet undecayed, and already displaying their wonder-working 
powers, lay as it were to welcome him. William was thus to be 
consecrated within the same temple where Harold had been con- 
secrated less than a year before. He was to be consecrated with 
the same rites and by the same hand. I wish we could believe, 
on the report of some later English writers, that William sought 
for consecration at the hands of Stigand, and that the high-souled 
primate refused to pour the holy unction on the head of an usurper 
and a man of blood. But had William offered to be crowned by 
Stigand, he would indeed have fallen away from his character 
as the reformer of English ecclesiastical discipline. The act, too, 
would have been equivalent to giving up one of his three counts 
against England; it would have been an acknowledgment that 
Archbishop Robert had been lawfully deposed. The scruple 
which had affected even the mind of Harold would probably be 
really felt by William with ten times as much force ; it would cer- 
tainly be professed by him with ten times as great ostentation. 

The special favorite and champion of Rome could not, in 
common consistency, ask for consecration at the hands of a 
primate whom Rome had declared to be no primate at all, and 
who had no pallium save that which he had received from an 
usurper of the Holy See. Still Stigand, though not a lawful pri- 
mate, was at least an ordained priest and a consecrated bishop; 
he might perhaps even be recognized as the lawful occupant of 
the See of Winchester. He was also personally the first man in 
England, to whom it was William's policy for the present to avoid 
giving any needless offence. He was therefore allowed to take 
a part in the ceremony second only to that of the actual celebrant. 
But the sacramental rite itself was to be performed by the hands 
of Ealdred. The Northern primate was the only canonical met- 
ropolitan in the realm, and he was the man who, as having 
been the leader of the embassy at Berkhampstead, might be 
looked on as having been the first Englishman to take a formal 
part in making William king. The Primate of Northumberland 
had thus in one year to anoint two kings, — the champion of Eng- 



yo English Historians 

land and her Conqueror. He had to anoint both far away from 
his own province, and to anoint both at a time when he could in 
no way pledge himself that the willing consent of his province 
should confirm his own formal act. 

§ 5. The Coronation oj William 

The Christmas morn at last came; and once more, as on 
the day of the Epiphany, a king-elect entered the portals of the 
West Minster to receive his crown. But now, unlike the day of 
the Epiphany, the approach to the church was kept by a guard 
of Norman horsemen. Otherwise all was peaceful. Within the 
church all was in readiness; a new crown, rich with gems, was 
ready for the ceremony; a crowd of spectators of both nations 
filled the minster. The great procession then swept on. A 
crowd of clergy bearing crosses marched first; then followed the 
bishops ; lastly, surrounded by the chief men of his own land and 
of his new kingdom, came the renowned duke himself, with 
Ealdred and Stigand on either side of him. Amid the shouts of 
the people, William the Conqueror passed on to the royal seat 
before the high altar, there to go through the same solemn rites 
which had so lately been gone 'through on the same spot by his 
fallen rival. The Te Deum which had been sung over Harold 
was now again sung over William. And now again, in ancient 
form, the crowd that thronged the minster was asked whether 
they would that the candidate who stood before them should be 
crowned king over the land. But now a new thing, unknown to 
the coronation of Eadward or of Harold, had to mark the corona- 
tion of William. A king was to be crowned who spake not our 
ancient tongue, and with him many who knew not the speech of 
England stood there to behold the rite. It was therefore not enough 
for Ealdred to demand in his native tongue whether the assembled 
crowd consented to the consecration of the duke of the Normans. 
The question had to be put a second time in French by Geoffrey, 
Bishop of Coutances, one of the prelates who had borne his 
part in those rites in the camp at Hastings which had ushered 
in the day of St. Calixtus. The assent of the assembled multi- 
tude of both nations was given in ancient form. The voices 
which on the Epiphany had shouted "Yea, yea, King Harold," 
shouted at Christmas with equal apparent zeal, "Yea, yea, King 
William." Men's hearts had not changed, but they had learned, 
through the events of that awful year, to submit as cheerfully as 



The Coronation of William the Conqueror 71 

might be to the doom which could not be escaped. The shout 
rang loud through the minster; it reached the ears of the Norman 
horsemen who kept watch round the building. 

They had doubtless never before heard the mighty voice of an 
assembled people. They deemed, or professed to deem, that some 
evil was being done to the newly chosen sovereign. Instead, how- 
ever, of rushing in to his help, they hastened, with the strange in- 
stinct of their nation, to set fire to the buildings around the min- 
ster. At once all was confusion, the glare was seen, the noise was 
heard, within the walls of the church. Men and women of all 
ranks rushed forth to quench the flames or to save their goods ; 
some, it is said, to seek for their chance of plunder in such a scene 
of terror. The king-elect, with the officiating prelates and clergy 
and the monks of the abbey, alone remained before the altar. 
They trembled, and perhaps for the first and last time in his 
life William trembled also. His heart had never failed him 
either in council or in battle ; but here was a scene the like of which 
William himself was not prepared to brave. But the rite went on ; 
the trembling duke took the oaths of an English king, — the oaths 
to do justice and mercy to all within his realm, — and a special oath, 
devised seemingly to meet the case of a foreign king, — an oath 
that, if his people proved loyal to him, he would rule them as 
well as the best of the kings who had gone before him. The 
prayers and litanies and hymns went on; the rite, hurried and 
maimed of its splendor, lacked nothing of sacramental virtue or of 
ecclesiastical significance. All was done in order ; while the flames 
were raging around, amid the uproar and shouts which surrounded 
the holy place, Ealdred could still nerve himself to pour the holy 
oil upon the royal head, to place the rod and the sceptre in the 
royal hands. In the presence of that small band of monks and 
bishops the great rite was brought to its close, and the royal diadem 
with all its gleaming gems rested firmly on the brow of William, 
king of the English. 

The work of the Conquest was now formally completed; the 
Conqueror sat in the royal seat of England. He had claimed the 
crown of his kinsman ; he had set forth his claim in the ears of 
Europe ; he had maintained it on the field of battle, and now it had 
been formally acknowledged by the nation over which he sought 
to rule. As far as words and outward rites went, nothing was now 
wanting: William was king, chosen, crowned, and anointed. 
But how far he still was from being in truth ruler over the whole 
land, the tale which is yet in store will set before us. We have 



72 English Historians 

yet to see how gradually William won, how sternly yet how wisely 
he ruled, the land which he had conquered. We have to see 
how, one by one, the native chiefs of England were subdued, 
won over, or cut off, and how the highest offices and the richest 
lands of England were parted out among strangers. We have to 
see the Conqueror in all his might; we have to see him, too, in 
those later and gloomier years, when home-bred sorrows gathered 
thickly round him, and when victory at last ceased to wait upon 
his banners. At last, by a cycle as strange as any in the whole 
range of history, we shall follow him to his burial as we have 
followed him to his crowning, and we shall see the body of the 
Conqueror lowered to his grave, in the land of his birth and in the 
minster of his own rearing, amid a scene as wild and awful as 
that of the day which witnessed his investiture with the royalty of 
England. 

Bibliographical Note 

Adams, A Political History of England, 1066-1216, pp. 1-10. Ramsay, 
Foundations oj England, Vol. II, chaps, i-x. Round, Feudal England, for 
controversial chapters on the battle of Hastings. 



CHAPTER II 

ANGLO-NORMAN FEUDALISM 

As a result of the Norman Conquest, the old English land- 
lords — earls and thegns — were displaced, and the lands of 
England with the peasants dwelling on them divided out among 
the followers of William, the latter quite naturally retaining a 
large share for himself. In addition to the lands, the new masters 
received certain governmental powers over their tenants, such as 
the right to do justice and punish offenders. The terms on which 
the lands were held and the powers which the lords enjoyed were 
destined to be the subject of innumerable disputes between kings 
and vassals during many centuries, for the kings often sought to 
lay enormous burdens on the lands and to have justice administered 
by their own officers, especially in order that they might enjoy the 
profits arising from fines. Sometimes these disputes even broke 
out into civil war, and sometimes they led to compromises in the 
form of documents such as the Great Charter. It is therefore of 
fundamental importance that the student should examine as care- 
fully as possible the conditions on which these lands were held. 

§ i. Position of William as Conqueror and Sovereign 1 

In 1066 the Anglo-Saxon commonwealth was suddenly invaded 
by a war band of Normans, led by William, Duke of Normandy. 
These invaders, originally from the north, had in the previous 
century settled on the soil of France and adopted the French lan- 
guage and customs. In their Norman home they had also devel- 
oped under Frankish influences a military and administrative 
system of their own, and after their conquest of England they 

1 Adapted from Gneist, History of the English Constitution, chap. viii. 
By permission of G. P. Putnam's Sons, Publishers. 

73 



74 English Historians 

naturally carried some of their ideas into practice so far as was 
necessary to secure their position as the dominant class under the 
sovereignty of William the Conqueror. 

The Duke of Normandy was recognized as king of England by 
a formally summoned National Assembly. The old controversy 
whether William the Bastard conquered England or under what 
other title he acquired control of the country may be considered 
as decided by the Conqueror himself, who declared that he had 
entered upon the possession of the country as the designated 
testamentary heir and legitimate successor of King Edward. 
This was the only manner in which the new monarch could gain 
the permanent obedience of his new subjects and make a stand 
against immoderate pretensions on the part of his followers. It 
was therefore not the tribe of the Normans but Duke William 
who had got possession of the country with a title from the pre- 
tended will of Edward, with the consent of the highest authority 
in the Church, and with the consent of the National Assembly. 
As a matter of fact, as well as of right, it was possible to treat the 
country in this way as a personal acquisition, as the "Seigneury," 
" Dominion," terra regis Anglica, terra mea — a designation fre- 
quently found in the records. 

The mutual relations of the Saxons and the Francigenae, 
however, remained hostile for many generations. The conquered 
people repaid the haughtiness of the victors by attempts at rebel- 
lion; and when these failed, by silent animosity towards the new 
lords and their French customs. 

§ 2. Organization 0} the Military System and Government on a 
Basis of Land Tenure 

The best way of considering the Norman settlement is therefore 
to regard it as a permanent military occupation which (with its 
numerous fortifications and maintenance of a paid soldiery) led 
to a thoroughly new military organization. But this change also 
corresponded to the actual needs of the country, because the 
Anglo-Saxon commonwealth had fallen through internal dissen- 
sion, a defective organization of its military array, and a faulty 
distribution of the military burdens. In order to regain the lost 
unity and strength, the system of resting military service upon 
popular levies and personal vassalage had to be abolished and the 
entire landed property, so far as it had to bear the burdens of mili- 
tary charges, took the form of property held on condition that the 



Anglo-Norman Feudalism yr 

specified military services should be discharged. This marks the 
period of the feudal system, which may be said to date from the 
time when the feature of military burdens became predominant 
in landed property, and the grants, to which the character of pay- 
ment of military services was attached, gave the warrior a perma- 
nently dependent position. England is the only state in which 
through special circumstances there was possible a systematic 
application of this principle which made the State, represented in 
the person of the king, the sole proprietor, hence permitting a fresh 
redistribution of all the land on the clear basis of dependent and 
derivative tenure. 

It was the position taken by William as the legitimate successor 
to King Edward which settled this question for England. In 
treating as rebels King Harold and those who fought on his side, 
as well as the Saxons who afterwards rebelled or opposed William, 
a legal justification was found for a general confiscation of landed 
estates. The inheritance of Edward and the possessions of the 
family of Harold were immediately seized as royal demesnes. 
By virtue of grants the leaders of the conquering host entered into 
the possessions of the defeated Saxons. The great vassals of Will- 
iam could either immediately furnish their own contingents 
charged upon their land grants or do so by subinfeudation, by 
which means a portion of the Saxon thegns, who had not been 
compromised in the war, could remain as undervassals upon their 
old estates. In a like manner the possessions of the churches and 
monasteries were retained and even increased. 

The object that the royal administration now pursued for a 
century was to impose on the whole mass of new and old possessors 
the obligation to do military service and bear the burdens of the 
state. The unit of land, known as the knight's fee, on which a 
specific obligation rested, tended to be the five-hide holding of 
the Anglo-Saxon period, yet with a stricter rating according to 
the value of the product of the particular unit. The charge rest- 
ing upon this military land unit was the furnishing at royal com- 
mand of one heavily-armed horseman for forty days' service in the 
year (servitium unius militis)} 

The exact period at which this universal systematization took 
place is a matter of controversy, but it seems highly probable 
that William the Conqueror did most of it in his day. Although it 
is an error to regard the system as rigid at any particular time 

1 On tenure by knight's service and tenure in general, see Pollock and 
Maitland, History of English Law, Vol. I, Bk. II. 



y6 English Historians 

or incapable of infinite modifications by private arrangements, 
there are certain general legal incidents marking the relations of 
lord and vassal in this complex land-holding system. 

§ 3. The Legal Incidents of the Feudal System 

1. Conditional Hereditability of the Grant. — According to Nor- 
man-French custom, conditional hereditability has been regarded 
as the rule also in Anglo-Norman fiefs. Yet the form of the grant 
of the land, dedi et concessi tibi et heredibus tuis, only means a con- 
cession amounting to continuous payment for military service 
rendered. The enfeoffment of the heir only took place condition- 
ally upon his being a man capable of fighting, and that of the 
heiress only where there was a failure of males and in order 
that she might marry a warrior acceptable to the military chief. 
Accordingly it was natural that the feoffee could neither sell nor 
mortgage the estate, nor make it a security for his debts, nor dispose 
of it by will ; and hence followed the further legal incidents. 

2. The Relevium, Relief. — As an acknowledgment that the 
vassal possessed the estate on condition of doing military service, 
a certain quantity of weapons and accoutrements or a sum of 
money was rendered by Norman custom, when a change of the 
person bound to service took place. Out of this change proceeded 
a fixed payment in recognition of the conditional tenure. In a 
certain sense the prima seisina, primer-seizin, is in addition to 
this. For greater security the king as lord of the fee could take 
possession of the estate after the death of the vassal until the suc- 
cessor proved his title, or, where necessary, pleaded and obtained 
his right and bound himself to pay the relevium. According to 
old feudal custom, the lord could in this way claim a whole year's 
income. 

3. Feudal Wardship and Marriage. — As it is an act of favor 
on the part of the feudal lord to give the fee to one personally 
incapable of performing military service, so he can take back the 
estate when the heir is a minor, exercise in person or through a 
custos the rights belonging to it, and continue this wardship, en- 
joying the profits, until the completion of the heir's twenty-first 
year, without rendering any account. As tutor legitimus of the 
ward's person he might also give the heir in marriage when the 
latter had arrived at a proper age and on such an occasion could 
exact money payments — a custom which arose under circum- 
stances when the nearest agnate was wont to drive a bargain con- 



Anglo-Norman Feudalism 77 

cerning the marriage of the ward. In the failure of sons, the 
heiress remained under this profitable wardship until her majority, 
and when she had come of age was married by the feudal lord to 
a husband who now became the real feodary. In the spirit of the 
old wardship the marriage of the female ward was also regarded 
as a money business. 

4. Aids,-Auxilia. — The original design of the fief as a means of 
obtaining service for the lord binds the vassal to an extraordinary 
contribution in extraordinary cases of honor and necessity, notably 
to ransom the lord who has been taken prisoner, to endow the 
lord's eldest daughter, and when his eldest son is made a knight. 
These three cases are mentioned in the Grand Coutumier and 
amongst the Normans in Naples and Sicily as the customary 
ones, but do not absolutely exclude other urgent cases, espe- 
cially contributions made by the under vassals towards the 
reliefs and aids which their lord pays to his feudal overlord and 
for the payment of his debts. 

5. The Escheat, Forfeiture of the Fief, is the last decisive point 
in which the conditional vaiue of the grant appears. The former 
takes place when the feudatory dies without heirs capable of suc- 
ceeding to the fief — a case that must frequently have occurred. 
Still more frequent was forfeiture on account of felony which 
includes almost all important crimes, regarding them from the 
point of view of disobedience towards thefeudal lord. The espe- 
cial harshness of the feudal law adds to the formal attainder on 
account of " treason and felony," a corruption of blood or disability 
of the descendants to succeed to the inheritance. 

Bibliographical Note 

Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, pp. 150 ff., on the feudal super- 
structure. Round, Feudal England, pp. 225-314, on the introduction of 
knight's service. Adams, A Political History of England, 1066-1216, pp. 
10 ff. ; Anglo-Saxon Feudalism, in the American Historical Review, Octo- 
ber, 1901. Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, Vol. I, Bk. II, 
especially for tenure and the conditions of service. Vinogradoff, The 
Growth of the Manor, Bk. Ill, on the feudal period. Stubbs, Constitutional 
History of England, Vol. I, chap, ix; Lectures on Early English History, 
chap. ii. 



CHAPTER III 

SORTS AND CONDITIONS OF MEN 

One of the most important ways in which feudal society differed 
from modern society was the manner in which the privileges and 
responsibilities of various classes of persons were largely determined 
by birth and fixed in law. While it is an undeniable fact that the 
possession of wealth gives decided advantages at law to-day, yet so 
far as formal principles are concerned, neither birth nor riches has 
any special privileges. It is a grave error, however, to regard the 
public and private law of the Middle Ages as applying indifferently 
to all inhabitants of the country. It is just this confusion of class 
rights with supposedly " national" rights, this identification of the 
class with the nation, which has led to so many grave misconcep- 
tions about the "liberties of British freemen." The position of 
the various classes within and before the mediaeval law is fully de- 
scribed in the section of Pollock and Maitland 's History of English 
Law, from which the following extract on three important classes 
is taken. 

§ i. The Earls and Barons l 

Our law hardly knows anything of a noble or of a gentle class ; 
all free men are in the main equal before the law. For a moment 
this may seem strange. A conquered country is hardly the place 
in which we should look for an equality which, having regard 
to other lands, we must call exceptional. Yet in truth it is the 
result of the Conquest, though a result that was slowly evolved. 
The compiler of the Leges Henrici would willingly have given us 
a full law of ranks or estates of men ; but the materials at his com- 

1 Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, 2nd edition, Vol. I, pp. 
40S ff. By permission of Professor Maitland and the Cambridge University 
Press. 

78 



Sorts and Conditions of Men 79 

mand were too heterogeneous: counts, barons, earls, thegns, 
Norman milites, English radknights, vidames, vavassors, sokemen, 
villeins, ceorls, serfs, two-hundred men, six-hundred men — a 
text writer can do little with this disorderly mass. But a strong 
king can do with it what he pleases : he can make his favor the 
measure of nobility; they are noble whom he treats as such. 
And he does not choose that there shall be much nobility. Gradu- 
ally a small noble class is formed, an estate of temporal lords, of 
earls and barons. The principles which hold it together are far 
rather land tenure and the king's will than the transmission of 
noble blood. Its members have political privileges which are the 
counterpart of political duties ; the king consults them, and is in 
some sort bound to consult them, and they are bound to attend 
his summons and give him counsel. They have hardly any other 
privileges. During the baron's life his children have no privileges ; 
on his death only the new baron becomes noble. 

The privileges of the earl or baron are, we say, extremely few. 
Doubtless from of old every free man was entitled to be judged by 
his peers : that is to say, he was entitled to insist that those who 
were to sit as his judges should not be of a legal rank lower than 
his own. Under the dominance of the law of tenure this rule would 
take the form that a vassal is not to be judged by sub vassals. 
So long as the king's court was a court of tenants in chief, any 
man would have found there those who were at least his equals, 
and even in a county court there would have been barons enough 
to judge any baron. As the administration of royal justice gradu- 
ally became the function of professional lawyers, the cry for a 
judicium parium was raised by the nobles, and in words this was 
conceded to them. For a long time, however, the concession had 
no very marked effect, because the court held coram rege, though for 
everyday purposes; but a bench of professional justices might at 
any moment assume a shape to which no baron could have taken 
exception — even a Parliament to which all the barons had 
been summoned might still be regarded as this same court taking 
for the nonce a specially solemn form. And the meaning of the 
rule was not very plain. On. the one hand, we hear the assertion 
that even in civil suits the earl or baron should have the judgment 
of his peers; on the other hand Peter des Roches, the king's minis- 
ter, can say that the king's justices are the peers of any man, and 
the very title of the "barons" of the exchequer forbids us to treat 
this as mere insolence. And so Bracton gives us no doctrine as 
to the privilege of the barons. He does recognize the distinction 



80 English Historians 

between the king's court of "justices" and the king's court of 
"peers," but for the sake of a quite other doctrine, which left but 
few traces in later law. When there is a charge of treason, the king 
himself is the accuser, and life, limb, and inheritance are at stake; 
therefore it is not seemly that the king, either in person or by his 
justices who represent his person, should be judge; so Bracton 
throws out the suggestion that the cause should come before the 
"peers." We have here no privilege of peerage, but a special 
rule for all cases of high treason, based on the maxim that no one 
should be judge in his own cause. Under the Edwards the privi- 
lege of peerage was gradually ascertained, as the court of law held 
coram rege, which by this time was known as the King's Bench, 
became more utterly distinct from the assembly of the barons. 
But in the end the baron had gained very little. If charged with 
treason or felony, he was tried by his peers ; if charged with a 
misdemeanor (trans gressio), if sued in a civil suit by high or low, 
if the king challenged his choicest franchises, there was no special 
court for him; he had to abide the judgment of the king's justices. 
A certain freedom from arrest in civil causes we may perhaps allow 
him; but in Bracton's age arrest in civil causes was as yet no 
common event. That the tenant in chief could not be excom- 
municated without the king's leave, was a privilege of the king 
rather than of the baronage. One other privilege the baron had, 
but it was of questionable value. When he was adjudged to be 
in the king's mercy, the amount of the amercement was fixed, or 
"affeered," not by his merely "free and lawful" neighbors, but 
by his peers. For this purpose, however, his peers were found 
in the "barons " of the exchequer, and these experts in finance were 
not likely to spare him. There are a few little rules of procedure 
which distinguish the noble from the non-noble. Thus we are 
told that a summons to court should allow an earl one month, a 
baron three weeks, a free man a fortnight ; and we may see some 
traces of a rule which exempts a baron from the necessity of 
swearing. Even the members of the king's family are under the 
ordinary law, though in their "personal" actions they have the 
same benefit of expeditious procedure that is enjoyed by merchants. 
Very different is the case of the king, who in all litigation "is 
prerogative." 

§ 2. The Knights 

Below the barons stand the knights ; the law honors them by 
subjecting them to special burdens; but still knighthood can 






Sorts and Conditions of Men 81 

hardly be accounted a legal status. In the administration of royal 
justice there is a great deal of work that can be done only by 
knights, at all events if there are knights to be had. Four 
knights, twelve knights, are constantly required as repre- 
sentatives of the county court or as recognitors. For some 
purposes mere free and lawful men will serve; for others, knights 
must be employed. On the whole, we may say that knights are 
required for the more solemn, the more ancient, the more decisive 
processes. To swear to a question of possession, free and lawful 
men are good enough; to give the final and conclusive verdict 
about a matter of right, knights are needed. They are treated as 
an able, trustworthy class; but we no longer find any such rule 
as that the oath of one thegn is equivalent to the oath of six ceorls. 
In administrative law, therefore, the knight is liable to some special 
burdens ; in no other respect does he differ from the mere free man. 
Even military service and scutage have become matters of tenure 
rather than matters of rank, and, though the king may strive to 
force into knighthood all men of a certain degree of wealth, we have 
no such rule as that none but a knight can hold a knight's fee, 
Still less have we any such rule as that none but a knight or none 
but a baron can keep a seignorial court. 

§ 3. The Unfree 

In the main, then, all free men are equal before the law. Just 
because this is so the line between the free and the unfree seems 
very sharp. And the line between freedom and unfreedom is 
the line between freedom and servitude. Bracton accepts to the 
full the Roman dilemma: Omnes homines aut liberi sunt aut 
servi. He will have no more unfreedom, no semi-servile class, 
no merely prsedial serfage, nothing equivalent to the Roman 
colonatus. All men are either free or serfs, and every serf is as 
much a serf as any other serf. We use the word serf, not the 
word slave; but it is to be remembered that Bracton had not got 
the word slave. He used the worst word that he had got, the 
word which, as he well knew, had described the Roman slave 
whom his owner might kill. And the serf has a dominus; we 
may prefer to render this by lord and not by master or owner, 
and it is worthy of observation that mediaeval Latin cannot express 
this distinction ; if the serf has a dominus, the palatine earl, nay, 
the king of England, so long as he is duke of Aquitaine, has a 
dominus also, and this is somewhat in the serf's favor; but still 



82 English Historians 

Bracton uses the only words by which he could have described a 
slave and slave owner. True, that servus is neither the commonest 
nor yet the most technical name for the unfree man ; more com- 
monly he is called villanus or nativus, and these are the words 
used in legal pleadings; but for Bracton these three terms are 
interchangeable, and though efforts, not very consistent or success- 
ful efforts, might be made to distinguish between them, and some 
thought it wrong to call the villeins serfs, still it is certain that 
nativus always implied personal unfreedom, that villanus did the 
same when employed by lawyers, and that Bracton was right in 
saying that the law of his time knew no degrees of personal un- 
freedom. Even in common practice and by men who were not 
jurists the word servus was sometimes used as an equivalent for 
nativus or villanus. The jurors of one hundred will call all the 
unfree people servi, while in the next hundred they will be villani. 
In French villein is the common word ; but the feminine of villein 
is nieve (nativa). 

There are no degrees of personal unfreedom; there is no such 
thing as merely praedial serfage. A free man may hold in villein- 
age ; but that is an utterly different thing ; he is in no sort a serf ; 
so far from being bound to the soil he can fling up his tenement 
and go whithersoever he pleases. In later centuries certain nice- 
ties of pleading gave rise to the terms villein in gross and 
villein regardant and in yet later times, when villeinage of any 
kind was obsolescent, these were supposed to point to two different 
classes of men, — the villein regardant being inseverable from a 
particular manor, while the villein in gross might be detached from 
the soil and sold as a chattel. The law of Bracton's time recognizes 
no such distinction. As a matter of fact and a matter of custom, 
English serfage may well be called praedial. In the first place, it 
rarely if ever happens that the serfs are employed in other work 
than agriculture and its attendant processes ; their function is to 
cultivate their lord's demesne. In the second place, the serf usu- 
ally holds more or less land, at least a cottage, or else is the member 
of a household whose head holds land, and the services that he 
does to his lord are constantly regarded in practice as the return 
which is due from him in respect of his tenement or even as the 
return due from the tenement itself; such services as we have 
already seen are often minutely defined by custom. In the third 
place, his lord does not feed or clothe him; he makes his own 
living by cultivating his villein tenement or, in case he is but a cot- 
tager, by earning wages at the hand of his wealthier neighbors. 



Sorts and Conditions of Men 83 

In the fourth place, he is seldom severed from his tenement; he 
is seldom sold as a chattel, though this happens now and again; 
he passes from feoffor to feoffee, from ancestor to heir as annexed 
to the soil. For all this, the law as administered by the king's 
court permits his lord to remove him from the tenement. It 
could hardly have done otherwise, for he held in villeinage, and 
even a free man holding in villeinage could be ejected from his 
tenement whenever the lord pleased without finding a remedy 
before the king's justices. But as to the serf, not only could he be 
removed from one tenement, he could be placed in another; his 
lord might set him to work of any kind ; the king's court would 
not interfere ; for he was a servus, and his person belonged to his 
lord; "he was merely the chattel of his lord to give and sell at 
his pleasure." 

But whatever terms the lawyers may use, their own first prin- 
ciples will forbid us to speak of the English "serf" as a slave; 
their own first principles, we say, for what we find is not a general 
law of slavery humanely mitigated in some details, but a concep- 
tion of serfdom which at many points comes into conflict with 
our notion of slavery. In his treatment of the subject Bracton 
frequently insists on the relativity of serfdom. Serfdom with him 
is hardly a status ; it is but a relation between two persons, serf and 
lord. As regards his lord the serf has, at least as a rule, no 
rights ; but as regards other persons he has all or nearly all the 
rights of a free man ; it is nothing to them that he is a serf. Now 
this relative serfdom we cannot call slavery. As regards mankind at 
large, the serf so far from being a mere thing is a free man. This 
seems to be the main principle of the law of Bracton's day. We 
must now examine each of its two sides: the serf's rightlessness 
as regards his lord, his freedom or " qiusi-freedom " as regards 
men in general. It will then remain to speak of his relation to the 
state. 

§ 4. The Serf in Relation to his Lord 

In relation to his lord, the general rule makes him rightless. 
Criminal law indeed protects him in life and limb. Such pro- 
tection, however, need not be regarded as an exception to the rule. 
Bracton can here fall back upon the Institutes: the State is 
concerned to see that no man shall make an ill use of his property. 
Our modern statutes which prohibit cruelty to animals do not give 
rights to dogs and horses, and, though it is certain that the lord 



84 English Historians 

could be punished for killing or maiming his villein, it is not certain 
that the villein or his heir could set the law in motion by means of 
an " appeal." The protection afforded by criminal law seems to 
go no farther than the preservation of life and limb. The lord 
may beat or imprison his serf, though of such doings we do not 
hear very much. 

As against his lord, the serf can have no proprietary rights. If 
he holds in villeinage of his lord, of course he is not protected in 
his holding by the king's courts ; but then this want of protection 
we need not regard as a consequence of serfdom, for, were he a 
free man, he still would be unprotected ; and then just as the free 
man holding in villeinage is protected by custom and manorial 
courts, so the serf is similarly protected. His rightlessness appears 
more clearly as regards his chattels and any land that he may 
have acquired from one who is not his master. As regards any 
movable goods that he has, the lord may take these to himself. We 
hear, indeed, hints that his " wainage," his instruments of husbandry, 
are protected even against his lord, and that his lord can be guilty 
against him of the crime of robbery; but these hints are either 
belated or premature; the lord has a right to seize his chattels. 
But it is a right to seize them and so become owner of them; 
until seizure, the serf is their owner, and others can deal with him 
as such. As a matter of fact, we hear little of arbitrary seizures, 
much of seizures which are not arbitrary but are the enforcement 
of manorial customs. The villeins are constantly amerced and 
distrained; the lord in his court habitually treats them as owners 
of chattels, he even permits them to make wills, and when they 
die he contents himself with a heriot. So here again, when we 
look at the facts, the serf's condition seems better described as un- 
protectedness than as rightlessness, though doubtless a lord may 
from time to time seize goods without being able to justify the 
seizure by reference to custom. Then, if the serf acquires land 
from some third person to hold by free tenure, he whose serf he 
is may seize it and hold it ; but until such seizure the serf is tenant 
and others may and must treat him as such. 

And then we find that all this rightlessness or unprotectedness 
exists only where serfdom exists de facto. The learning of seizin 
or possession and the rigid prohibition of self-help have come to the 
aid of the serfs. Serfdom and liberty are treated as things of which 
there may be possession, legally protected possession. A fugitive 
serf may somewhat easily acquire a " seizin" of liberty. When he 
is seized of liberty, the lord's power of self-help is gone ; he can no 



Sorts and Conditions of Men 85 

longer capture the fugitive without a writ ; he can no longer take 
any lands or chattels that the fugitive may have acquired since his 
flight. He must have recourse to a writ, and the fugitive will have 
an opportunity of asserting that by rights he is a free man, and of 
asserting this in the king's court before justices who openly profess 
a leaning in favor of liberty. We need not suppose that this 
curious extension of the idea of possession is due to this leaning; 
it is part and parcel of one of the great constructive exploits of 
mediaeval law — relationships which exist de facto are to be pro- 
tected until it be proved that they do not exist de iure. Still the 
doctrine, though it had a double edge, told against the lords. 
Apparently in Bracton's day a serf who fled had to be captured 
within four days; otherwise he could not be captured, unless 
within a year and a day he returned to "his villein nest " ; a parallel 
rule gave the ejected landholder but four days for self-help. Of 
course, however, every absence from the lord's land was not a 
flight ; the serf might be living elsewhere and making some periodic 
payment, chevagium, head-money, in recognition of his lord's 
rights ; if so, he was not in seizin of his liberty. What the Insti- 
tutes say about domesticated animals can be regarded as to the 
point. 

Yet another qualification of rightlessness is suggested. More 
than once Bracton comes to the question whether the lord may 
not be bound by an agreement, or covenant, made with his serf. 
He is inclined to say Yes. His reasoning is this: the lord can 
manumit his serf, make him free for all purposes ; but the greater 
includes the less ; therefore the serf may be made a free man for a 
single purpose, — namely, that of exacting some covenanted benefit, 
and yet for the rest may remain a serf. Such reasoning is natural 
if once we regard serfdom as a mere relationship between two per- 
sons. It does not, however, seem to have prevailed for any long 
time, for our law came to a principle which was both more easily 
defensible and more hostile to serfdom, — namely, that if the lord 
makes a covenant with his serf, this implies a manumission; he 
becomes free because his lord has treated him as free. Bracton's 
doctrine very possibly had facts behind it and was no empty specu- 
lation, for we do find lords making formal agreements with their 
serfs; but it ran counter to a main current of English land law. 
The agreements that Bracton had in view were in the main agree- 
ments relating to the tenure of land, and as we have already seen, 
our law was strongly disinclined to recognize any contract con- 
cerning the occupation of land which was merely a contract and 



86 English Historians 

not a bestowal of "real" rights; it urged the dilemma — no right 
to occupy land or some one of the known forms of legal tenure. 

§ 5. Relation of the Serf to Third Persons 

The serf's position in relation to all men other than his lord is 
simple — he is to be treated as a free man. When the lord is not 
concerned, criminal law makes no difference between bond and 
free, and apparently the free man may have to do battle with the 
bond. A blow given to a serf is a wrong to the serf. It may also 
give his lord a cause of action against the striker ; but here also the 
law makes no difference between bond and free. If my serf is 
assaulted so that I lose his services or so that I suffer contumely, 
I have an action for damages; but it would be no otherwise had 
the assaulted person been my free servant. So also in defining the 
master's liability for wrongful acts done by his dependents, the 
same principles as regards authorization and ratification seem to 
be applied whether the dependents be free servants or serfs. It 
is rather for the acts of members, free or bond, of his household 
(manupastus, mainpast), that a man can be held liable than for 
the acts of his serfs. 

Then in relation to men in general, the serf may have lands and 
goods, property and possession, and all appropriate remedies. 
Of course if he is ejected from a villein tenement, he has no action; 
the action belongs to the lord of whom he holds the tenement, 
who may or may not be his personal lord; were he a free man 
holding in villeinage, he would be no better off. But the serf can 
own and possess chattels and hold a tenement against all but his 
lord. This general proposition may require some qualifications 
or explanations in particular instances. We read in the Dialogue 
on the Exchequer that if the lord owes scutage to the crown, his 
serf's chattels can be seized, but ought not to be seized until his 
own chattels have been exhausted. We read in Bracton that when a 
lord is to be distrained his villein's chattels should be the very first 
object of attack; but in these cases we may say that the serf, 
having no proprietary rights against his lord, is treated as having 
none against those who by virtue of legal process are enabled to 
claim what the lord himself could seize — the general principle 
is hardly impaired by such qualifications, and it is a most important 
principle. 

Still it is not a natural principle. This attempt to treat a man 
now as a chattel and now as a free and lawful person, or rather 



Sorts and Conditions of Men 87 

to treat him as being both at one and the same moment, must give 
rise to difficult problems such as no law of true slavery can ever 
have to meet. Suppose, for example, that a villein makes an agree- 
ment with one who is not his lord; it seems certain that the villein 
can enforce it; but can the other contractor enforce it? To this 
question we have a definite answer from Britton, — a contract 
cannot be enforced against a villein; if he is sued and pleads 
"I was the villein of X when this agreement was made and all that 
I have belongs to him," then the plaintiff, unless he will contradict 
this plea, must fail and his action will be dismissed ; nor can he 
sue X, for (unless there is some agency in the case) the lord is not 
bound by his serf's contract. In later times this rule must have 
been altered; the plea, "I am the villein of X and hold this land 
of him in villeinage," was often urged in action for land, 
but we do not find the plea, "I am the villein of X, " set up in purely 
"personal" actions, as assuredly it would have been had it been 
a good plea. But, even if we admit that a villein may be sued upon 
contract, the creditor's remedy is precarious, for the lord can seize 
all the lands and chattels of his serf, and an action against his serf 
is just what will arouse his usually dormant right. Thus the law, 
in trying to work out its curious principle of "relative servitude," 
is driven to treat the serf as a privileged person, as one who can 
sue but not be sued upon a contract and, even when it allows that 
he can be sued, it can give the creditor but a poor chance of getting 
paid and will hardly prevent collusion between villeins and friendly 
lords. Again, we see the ecclesiastical courts condemning the 
villein to pay money for his sins, fornication, and the like, and then 
we see the villein getting into trouble with his lord for having thus 
expended money which in some sort was his lord's. The law 
with its idea of relative servitude seems to be fighting against the 
very nature of things and the very nature of persons. 

§ 6. Relation of the Serf to the State 

Lastly, we should notice the serf's position in public law. It 
is highly probable that a serf could not sit as the judge of a free 
man, though it may be much doubted whether this rule was strictly 
observed in the manorial courts. He could not sit as a judge in 
the communal courts, though he often had to go to them in the 
humbler capacity of a "presenter." So, too, he could not be a juror 
in civil causes; this he probably regarded as a blessed exemption 
from a duty which fell heavily on free men. But in criminal 



88 English Historians 

and in fiscal matters he had to make presentments. At least in 
the earlier part of the century, the verdict or testimony which sends 
free men to the gallows is commonly that of twelve free men in- 
dorsed by that of the representatives of four townships, and such 
representatives were very often, perhaps normally, born villeins. 
Such representatives served on coroners' inquests, and the king 
took their testimony when he wished to know the extent of the 
royal rights. In the "halimoots" or manorial courts the serfs 
are busy as presenters, jurors, affeerers of amercements, if not as 
judges; they fill the manorial offices; the reeve of the township 
is commonly a serf. What is more, the State in its exactions pays 
little heed to the line between free and bond; it expects all men, 
not merely all free men, to have arms ; so soon as it begins to levy 
taxes on movables, the serfs, if they have chattels enough, must 
pay for them. It is but a small set-off for all this onerous freedom 
that a serf cannot be produced as champion or as compurgator; 
and even this rule is made to operate in favor of liberty ; if a lord 
produces a serf as champion or compurgator, this is an implied 
manumission. The serfs have to bear many of the burdens of 
liberty. The State has a direct claim upon their bodies, their 
goods, their time, and their testimony, and if for a moment this 
seems to make their lot the less tolerable, it prevents our thinking 
of them as domestic animals, the chattels of their lords. 

§ 7. How Men Become Serfs 

Having seen what serfdom means, we may ask how men become 
serfs. The answer is that almost always the serf is a born serf; 
nativus and villanus were commonly used as interchangeable 
terms. But as to the course by which serfdom is transmitted 
from parent to child, we find more doubts than we might have 
expected. If both parents are serfs, of course the child is a serf; 
but if one parent is free and the other a serf, then difficulties seem 
to arise. The writer of the Leges Henrici holds that the child 
follows the father; but he quotes the proverb, Vitulus matris 
est cuiuscunque taurus alluserit, and seems to admit that in 
practice the child is treated as a serf if either of the parents is 
unfree. Glanvill is clear that the child of an unfree woman is a 
serf and seems to think that the child of an unfree man is no better 
off. Thus we should get the rule, which had been approved by 
the Church, — namely, that, whenever free and servile blood are 
mixed, the servile prevails. Bracton, however, has a more elabo- 



Sorts and Conditions of Men 89 

rate scheme. A bastard follows the mother; the child of a bond- 
woman, if born out of wedlock, is a serf; if born in wedlock 
and of a free father, then another distinction must be taken ; if a 
free man takes a bondwoman to wife and they dwell in her villein 
tenement, then their offspring will be born serfs ; but if she follows 
him to "a free couch," then their children will be born free. So 
also when a bondman marries a free woman, the character of the 
tenement in which they dwell determines the character of the 
offspring. The influence thus ascribed to the tenement is very 
curious; it shows that to keep villein status and villein tenure 
apart was in practice a difficult matter, even for a lawyer ever 
ready to insist that in theory they had nothing to do with each 
other. In later days the courts seem to have adopted the simple 
rule that the condition of the father is the decisive fact, and to 
have pressed this rule to the absurd^ if humane, conclusion that a 
bastard is always born free since he has no father. 

"Mixed marriages, " indeed, gave a great deal of trouble through- 
out the Middle Ages by raising questions as to the rights and 
remedies of the husband and wife. Ultimately "the better opinion 
of our books " was that the marriage of a female serf with a free 
man, other than her lord, did not absolutely enfranchise her, but 
merely made her free during the marriage. In 1302, however, we 
find two justices denouncing this doctrine as false, "and worse 
than false, for it is heresy"; apparently they think that such a 
marriage hflts all the effect of a manumission ; but their opinion did 
not go undisputed. Such a marriage would not at any rate drag 
down the free man into personal servitude, though according to 
Bracton the issue of it would be serfs if they were born in the 
villein tenement. In the converse case in which a bondman marries 
a free woman, he of course is not enfranchised, though Bracton's 
doctrine would make their children free if born in her free tene- 
ment. On the contrary, it might be thought that, at all events if 
she went to live along with her villein husband in his villein tene- 
ment and to bear him villein children, she herself would be ac- 
counted a villein. But this was not the rule. How far during the 
marriage she could- make good any rights against her husband's 
lord (and it will be remembered that as against all others her 
husband was a free man) was very doubtful; she could not sue 
without her husband, and if he joined in the action, the lord would 
say, "You are my villein." But on her husband's death she would 
be free once more, or rather her freedom would once more become 
apparent and operative. 



90 English Historians 

Faint traces may be found of an opinion that birth in a certain 
district or a certain tenement will make the child unfree, or as the 
case may be, free, no matter the condition of its parents; but, 
except in the well-known privilege of Kentish soil, it seems to have 
found no legal sanction. 

A person born free rarely becomes a serf. When Bracton 
speaks of prisoners of war being held as slaves and of a freeman 
being reduced to slavery on account of his ingratitude, this is but 
Romanesque learning. We do not in this age hear of servitude 
as a punishment, though the Welsh marchers claim the right of 
selling criminals as slaves, and King John can threaten all men 
with slavery if they do not take arms to resist an invasion. Nor do 
we any longer hear of free men selling themselves into slavery. 
But it is a principle of law that if a person has once confessed 
himself the serf of another in a court of record, he can never there- 
after be heard to contradict this assertion, and so "confession" 
takes its place beside " birth" as one of the origins of servility. 
There are abundant cases in our records which suggest that this 
talk about confession is not idle; a defendant sometimes seeks to 
evade a plaintiff's demand by confessing that he is the villein of 
a third person, and thus, even in the later Middle Ages, men may 
sometimes have purchased peace and protection at the cost of 
liberty. 

Whether prolonged serfdom de facto will generate serfdom de iure, 
was in Edward I's day a moot point. Some justices lakl down as a 
maxim that no prescription can ever make servile, blood that once 
was free. Others flatly denied this rule, and apparently held that, 
if from father to son a succession of free men went on doing villein 
services, the time would come when an unfree child would be born 
to a free father. One opinion would have condemned to servi- 
tude the fifth generation in a series of persons performing base 
services, while a Scottish law book mentions the fourth generation, 
and a common form of pleading made a lord assert that he had 
been seized of the grandfather and great-great-grandfather of the 
man whose liberty was in dispute. Opinion might fluctuate about 
this question, because procedural rules prevented it from being 
often brought to a decision. The general rule as to the means by 
which free or servile status could be conclusively proved was that 
it must be proved per parentes. If the burden of proof lay on the 
person whose status was in question, he had to produce free kins- 
men ; if it lay on the would-be lord, he had to produce kinsmen of 
the would-be free man who would confess themselves serfs. A mere 



Sorts and Conditions of Men 91 

verdict of the country might settle the question .provisionally and, 
as we may say, for possessory purposes, but could not settle it 
conclusively except as against one who had voluntarily submitted 
to this test. The burden of the proof is thrown on one side or 
the other by seizin ; the man who is in de facto enjoyment of liberty 
continues to be free until his servility is proved ; the man who is 
under the power of a lord must remain so until he has shown his 
right to liberty. On the whole, the procedural rules seem favor- 
able to freedom. In Bracton's day a four days' flight might throw 
the burden of proof upon the lord, and he would have to make out 
his title, not by the testimony of free and lawful neighbors, who 
would naturally infer serfdom de hire from serfdom de facto, but by 
the testimony of the fugitive's own kinsfolk as to the fugitive's 
pedigree, and they must confess themselves serfs before their 
testimony can be of any avail. On the other hand, if a man has 
been doing villein services, he may as a matter of fact easily fall 
into serfage, unless he is willing to run from hearth and home and 
risk all upon a successful flight and an action at law. If for gen- 
eration after generation his stock has held a villein tenement and 
done villein services, he will be reckoned a villein, that is, a serf; 
even his kinsfolk will not dare to swear that he is free. There is 
no form of service so distinctly servile that it must needs be ascribed 
to servile status and not to villein tenure ; even the merchet, which 
is regarded as the best test, may sometimes be paid ratione tenementi 
and not ratione personce; but a prolonged performance of villein 
services must put a family's free status in jeopardy. That this is 
not so as a matter of law seems the opinion of the highest authori- 
ties ; but the fact that a contrary opinion was current both in Eng- 
land and in Scotland may well make us think that in common life 
there had been a close connection between villein tenure and villein 
status. 

§ 8. The Manumission of Serfs 

And now as to the manumission : a lord can easily enfranchise 
his serf. He can do so expressly by charter of manumission; 
he does so impliedly by a grant of land to be held freely by the 
serf and his heirs, for a serf can have no heir but his lord ; he does 
so impliedly by certain acts which treat the serf as free, by pro- 
ducing him in the king's court as his champion or compurgator; 
it is becoming dangerous for a lord to make any written agreement 
with his serf. There has been difficulty as to a direct purchase of 



92 English Historians 

liberty. If the serf paid money to the lord for the grant of freedom, 
the lord might, it would seem, revoke the grant on the ground that 
the serf's money was his own money. This technical difficulty, for 
perhaps it was no more, was evaded by the intervention of a third 
person who made the purchase nominally with his own but really 
with the serf's money, and the serf having been sold and delivered 
(the ownership did not pass until delivery) was set free by his new 
owner. 

In Bracton's day every act of manumission by the lord seems to 
have conferred full and perfect freedom ; the freed man was in all 
respects the equal of the free born. This could hardly have been 
otherwise since, as we have seen, serfdom was regarded for the 
more part as a mere relation between two persons. Glanvill seems 
to have held a different opinion. He speaks as though the libera- 
tion would make the serf free as regards his former lord, but leave 
him a serf as regards all other men. The chief, if not the only, 
point that Glanvill had before his mind when he wrote this seems 
to have been that the free villein could not be produced as champion 
or compurgator. It is possible, also, that he hid in view acts of 
enfranchisement which were merely private and would not have 
denied that there were solemner methods by which absolute free- 
dom could be conferred. In the Leges Henrici the man who 
wishes to free his serf must do so in public, "in a church or a market 
or a county court or a hundred court, openly and before witnesses" ; 
lance and sword are bestowed upon the new free man, and a cere- 
mony is enacted which shows him that all ways lie open to his 
feet. Glanvill may have required some such public act if perfect 
liberty was to be conferred ; but Bracton, who habitually regards 
serfdom as a mere relationship, sees no difficulty; the lord by 
destroying relationship destroys serfdom. Here we seem to. see 
a modern notion of relative serfdom growing at the expense of an 
older notion of true slavery. To turn a thing into a person is a 
feat that cannot be performed without the aid of the State ; but to 
make free as against yourself one who is already free as against all 
but you, this you can easily do, for it is hardly a matter of public 
law. 

The serf will also become free (i) by dwelling for a year and a 
day on the king's demesne or in a privileged town — this is an 
assertion of prerogative right which peoples the king's manors and 
boroughs; (2) by being knighted — knighthood confers but a 
provisional freedom, for the knighted serf can be degraded when his 
servility is proved ; (3) by entering religion or receiving holy orders ; 



Sorts and Conditions of Men oj 

it is unlawful to ordain a serf — this is forbidden by canon as well 
as by temporal law; but when he is once ordained, he is free 
though his serfdom revives if he resumes a secular life. The lord's 
right of action for the recovery of a serf was subject to a prescrip- 
tive term; in 1236 the year 1210 was chosen as the limit and this 
limit was not altered until 1275; we have already seen that his 
right of self-help the lord lost somewhat easily, though less easily 
as time went on. 

Such, briefly stated, is the English law of villeinage or serfage 
in the thirteenth century. Its central idea, that of the relativity 
of serfage, is strange. It looks artificial: that is to say, it seems 
to betray the handiwork of lawyers who have forced ancient facts 
into a modern theory. Slavery is very intelligible; so is slavery 
tempered by humane rules which will forbid an owner to maltreat 
his human chattel ; so again is a praedial serfage, and the ancient 
laws of our race compel us to admit that there may be a half-free 
class — men who are neither liberi homines nor yet servi; but a 
merely relative serfdom is a juristic, curiosity. In defining it we 
have ever to be using the phrases, "in relation to," "as regards," 
"as against" — phrases which would not easily occur to the un- 
lettered, and law which allows my serf to sue any free man but me, 
even to sue my lord, does not look like a natural expression of any 
of those deep-seated sentiments which demand that divers classes 
of men shall be kept asunder. Then this idea of relative servitude 
has to be further qualified before it will square with facts and cus- 
toms and current notions of right and wrong. When a lord 
allows it to be recorded that on the death of his servile tenant he is 
entitled to the best beast, he goes very far toward admitting that he 
is not entitled to seize the chattels of his serf without good cause. 
We hesitate before we describe the serf as rightless even as against 
his lord, and, if we infer want of right from want of remedy, we feel 
that we may be doing violence to the thoughts of a generation 
which saw little difference between law and custom. On the 
whole, looking at the law of Bracton's day, we might guess that 
here as elsewhere the king's court has been carrying out a great 
work of simplification ; we might even guess that its "serf- villein," 
rightless against his lord, free against all but his lord, is as a matter 
of history a composite person, a serf and a villein rolled into one. 

That this simplifying process greatly improved the legal position 
of the serf can hardly be doubted. We need not indeed suppose 
that the theow or servus of earlier times had been subjected to a 
rigorously consistent conception of slavery. Still in the main he 



94 English Historians 

had been rightless, a chattel ; and we may be sure that his right- 
lessness had not been the merely relative rightlessness of the u serf- 
villein" of later days, free against all but his lord. Indeed, we 
may say that in the courts of the twelfth century slavery was abol- 
ished. That, on the other hand, the villani suffered in the process, 
is very likely. Certainly they suffered in name. A few of them, 
notably those on the king's manors, may have fallen on the right 
side of the Roman dilemma, ant liberi aut servi, and as free 
men holding by unfree tenure may have become even more dis- 
tinctively free than they were before ; but most of them fell on the 
wrong side : they got a bad name and were brought within the 
range of maxims which described the English theow or the Roman 
slave. 

Probably we ought not to impute to the lawyers of this age any 
conscious desire to raise the serf or to debase the villein. The 
great motive force which directs their doings in this as in other 
instances is a desire for the utmost generality and simplicity. 
They will have as few distinctions as possible. All rights in land 
can be expressed by the formula of dependent tenure ; all conceiv- 
able tenures can be brought under some half-dozen heads; so 
also the lines which have divided men into sorts and conditions 
may with advantage be obliterated, save one great line. All men 
are free or serfs ; all free men are equal ; all serfs are equal — no 
law of ranks can be simpler than that. In this instance they had 
Roman law to help them ; but even that was not simple enough for 
them ; the notion of coloni who are the serfs of a tenement rather 
than of a person, though it might seem to have so many points 
of contact with the facts of English villeinage, was rejected in the 
name of simplicity. They will carry through all complexities 
a maxim of their own, — the serf is his lord's chattel, but is free 
against all but his lord. They reck little of the interests of any 
classes, high or low; but the interests of the State, of peace and 
order and royal justice, are ever before them. 

We have spoken at some length of the " serf -villeins " of the 
thirteenth century, for they formed a very large class. For several 
reasons precise calculations .are impossible. In the first place, 
tenure is so much more important than status, at least so much 
more important as a matter of manorial economy, that the "ex- 
tents" and surveys are not very careful to separate the personally 
free from the personally unfree. In the second place, it is highly 
probable that large numbers of men did not know on which side 
of the legal gulf they stood; they and their ancestors had been 



Sorts and Conditions of Men 05 

doing services that were accounted villein, paying merchet, and 
so forth; but this was not conclusive, and if they escaped from 
their lord it might be very difficult for him to prove them his "na- 
tives." On the other hand, while they remained in his power, they 
could have little hope of proving themselves free, and if they fled 
they left their all behind them. In the third place, a great part 
of our information comes from the estates of the wealthiest abbeys, 
and while admitting to the full that the monks had no wish to ill- 
treat their peasantry, we cannot but believe that of all lords they 
were the most active and most far-sighted. Lastly, we have as 
yet in print but little information about certain counties which 
we have reason to suppose were the least tainted with servitude, 
about Kent (already in Edward I's time it was said that no one 
could be born a villein in Kent), about Norfolk and Suffolk, about 
the Northumbrian shires. Still, when all is said, there remain 
the Hundred Rolls for the counties of Bedford, Buckingham, Cam- 
bridge, Huntingdon, and Oxford, and no one can read them without 
coming to the conclusion that the greater half of the rural popula- 
tion is unfree. The jurors of various hundreds may tell us this in 
different ways ; but very commonly by some name such as nativi 
or servi, by some phrase about " ransom of flesh and blood" or 
the like, they show their belief that taken in the lump those peas- 
ants, who are not freeholders and are not royal sokemen, are not 
free men. 

Occasionally a man who was born a villein might find a grand 
career open to him. It was said that John's trusty captain, Gerard 
de Athee, whose name is handed down to infamy by Magna Carta, 
was of servile birth ; in 13 13 the Bishop of Durham manumitted a 
scholar of Merton who was already a " master"; in 1308 Simon 
of Paris, mercer and alderman, who had been sheriff of London, 
was arrested as a fugitive villein, after being required to serve as 
reeve of his native manor. 

Bibliographical Note 

Gneist, History of the English Constitution, chaps, vi and xx. Vinogra- 
doff, The Growth of the Manor, pp. 332 ff. Stubbs, Constitutional History of 
England, Vol. I, chap, xi, §§ 124, 132. 



CHAPTER IV 

REFORMS IN CHURCH AND STATE UNDER HENRY II 

The true nature of feudalism, in its logical consequences, was 
demonstrated in the anarchy of Stephen's reign, and when Henry 
II came to the throne he found sovereign power shared by many 
factions and interests in the State. The Church claimed for its 
courts extensive jurisdiction over laymen and clergy in matters 
which we now regard as rightly belonging to secular powers. 
Furthermore, under the Hildebrandine ideas on the exalted powers 
of the Church, the latter claimed an independence from secular 
authority, which, however righteous it may have been, was re- 
garded by the king as wholly incompatible with national unity. 
In addition to the great strength of the Church, there were the 
barons who enjoyed within their respective domains almost regal 
powers. Finally the governmental machinery for executing the 
law, maintaining police control, and administering royal justice 
had fallen so badly into disorder that Henry II had to reorganize 
it and define its sphere of action in order to make his will effective 
throughout his realm. In other words, the ideal towards which he 
was working was the subjection of all men and all institutions to 
the supremacy of the secular State of which the king was the per- 
sonal embodiment. In this work he met the stoutest opposition 
in the mighty champion of the Church, Thomas Becket. 

§ i. Thomas Becket as an Ecclesiastic 1 

Thomas Becket, who had been selected by Archbishop Theobald 
as the fittest adviser of the young king, was endowed with many 
brilliant and serviceable gifts. He was an able man of business, 

1 Stubbs, Constitutional History of England, Vol. I, chap. xii. By per- 
mission of the Delegates of the Clarendon Press, Oxford. 

96 



Reforms in Church and State under Henry II 97 

versatile, politic ; liberal even to magnificence ; well skilled in the 
laws of England, and not deficient in the accomplishments of either 
clerk or knight. His singular career illustrates at once the state 
of the clergy at the time and his own power of adapting himself, 
apparently with a good conscience, to each of the three great 
schools of public life in turn. The clergy of the Norman reigns 
may be arranged under three classes: there is the man of the 
thoroughly secular type, like Roger of Salisbury, a minister of 
state and a statesman, who has received high preferment in the 
Church as a reward for official service; there is the professional 
ecclesiastic, like Henry of Winchester, who looks to the interests 
of the Church primarily, whose public course is dictated by 
regard for clerical objects, who aims at a mediatorial position in 
the conflicts of the State, and who has close relations with the great 
ecclesiastical centre at Rome ; and there is, thirdly the man who, 
not less patriotic than the first and not less ecclesiastical than the 
second, acts on and lives up to higher principles of action, and 
seeks first and last what seems to him to be the glory of God. This 
last class is represented to some extent by Anselm; it is not nu- 
merous and in an age of monastic sanctity and pretension is 
especially exposed to the intrusion of false brethren, such as the 
fanatic who is ambitious of martyrdom, or the hypocrite who will 
endure the risks of persecution, provided he obtains the honor 
of popularity. Thomas Becket lived through all three phases, and 
friends and enemies to the present day debate to which of the 
two divisions of the last class his life and death assign him. His 
promotion to Canterbury put an end to the first act of his career. 
Until then he had been the chancellor, the lawyer, judge, finan- 
cier, captain, and secretary of state. Now he became the primate, 
the champion of the clergy, the agent or patron of the pope, 
whom he probably had persuaded Henry to recognize; the as- 
sertor of the rights of his Church and of his own constitutional 
position as first independent adviser of the crown. The date at 
which he resigned the chancellorship is uncertain; but it seems 
clear that, before Henry's return from France, he had made him- 
self enemies among his former associates by demanding from them 
restitution of estates belonging to the See of Canterbury which, as 
he maintained, they held unjustly, and by otherwise asserting the 
temporal claims of his see. Henry was no doubt hurt by the 
resignation of the chancellor, but was scarcely prepared to find his 
late minister placing himself in an attitude of opposition which had 
no precedent in the history of the last hundred years. Anselm's 

H 



98 English Historians 

quarrels arose from spiritual questions. Those of Thomas began 
on a purely secular point. 

§ 2. First Dispute between Becket and the King 

The account given by the contemporary writers of this first dis- 
pute is very obscure : it concerned, however, some question of taxa- 
tion in which the king was anxious to make a change beneficial 
to the royal revenue. Every hide of land, we are told, paid to the 
sheriff two shillings annually, in consideration of his services in 
the administration and defence of the shire. This sum the king 
wished to have enrolled as part of the royal revenue, intending 
probably to reduce, as he afterwards did, the power of the sheriffs, 
or to remunerate them from some other fund. A tax so described 
bears a strong resemblance to the Danegeld, which was an impost 
of two shillings on the hide, and was "collected by the sheriffs, being 
possibly compounded for at a certain rate, and paid by them into 
the Exchequer. As the Danegeld from this very year (1 163) ceases 
to appear as a distinct item of account in the Pipe Rolls, it is 
impossible to avoid connecting the two ideas, even if we may not 
identify them. Whether the king's object in making this propo- 
sition was to collect the Danegeld in its full amount, putting an 
end to the nominal assessment which had been long in use, and so 
depriving the sheriffs of such profit as they made from it, or whether 
he had some other end in view, it is impossible now to determine ; 
and consequently it is difficult to understand the position taken by 
the archbishop. "We will not," he is recorded to have said, "my 
lord king, saving your good pleasure, give this money as revenue ; 
but if the sheriffs and servants and ministers of the shires will 
perform their duties as they should, and maintain and defend our 
dependents, we will not be behindhand in contributing to their 
aid." The king in anger answered, "By the eyes of God, it shall 
be given as revenue, and it shall be entered in the king's accounts ; 
and you have no right to contradict; no man wishes to oppress 
your men against your will." Becket replied, "My lord king, by 
the reverence of the eyes by which you have sworn, it shall not 
be given from my land, and from the rights of the Church not a 
penny." We are not told further of the immediate result; but the 
king and his minister never met again as friends. This is, how- 
ever the details may be understood, the first case of any opposition 
to the king's will in the matter of taxation which is recorded in our 
national history. 



Reforms in Church and State under Henry II 99 



§ 3. The Church-State Quarrel 

Three months after in October, in the Council of Westminster, 
a fresh constitutional quarrel broke out. Ever since the Con- 
queror had divided the temporal and spiritual courts of justice, 
the treatment of criminal clerks had been a matter of difficulty; 
the lay tribunals were prevented by the ecclesiastical ones from 
enforcing justice, and the ecclesiastical ones were able only to inflict 
spiritual penalties. The reasonable compromise which had been 
propounded by the Conqueror himself, in the injunction that 
the lay officials should enforce the judgments of the bishops, had 
been rendered inefficacious by the jealousies of the two estates; 
and the result was that in many cases grossly criminal acts of clerks 
escaped unpunished, and gross criminals eluded the penalty of 
their crimes by declaring themselves clerks. The fact that the 
king took up the question at this moment seems to show that he was 
already undertaking the reform of the criminal law which he car- 
ried into effect three years after. He proposed that the anoma- 
lous state of things should cease; that clerical criminals should 
be brought before the temporal court and accused there; if they 
pleaded not guilty, they were to be tried in the ecclesiastical court ; 
if found guilty, to be degraded there and brought back to the tem- 
poral court for punishment as laymen. Becket resisted; it* was 
sufficient that the criminal should be degraded : if he offended 
again, he offended as a layman, and the king might take him; 
but the first punishment was sufficient for the first offence. The 
king on the same occasion complained heavily of the exactions of 
the ecclesiastical courts, and proposed to the assembled bishops 
that they should promise to abide by the customs which regulated 
those courts and the rights of the clergy generally, as they had 
been allowed in the days of his grandfather. The archbishop 
saw that to concede this unreservedly would be to place the whole 
of the clergy at the king's mercy; he prevailed on the bishops to 
assent "saving their order," and the king, irritated by the oppo- 
sition, left the assembly in anger. Immediately after he ordered 
the archbishop to resign the honors of Eye and Berkhampstead, 
which had been committed to him as chancellor. 

§ 4. The Council and Constitutions of Clarendon 

After two or three unsatisfactory interviews with Becket, the 
king called together at Clarendon, in January, 1 164, the whole body 

LOFC. 



IOO English Historians 

of the bishops and barons. Again the archbishop was bidden to 
accept the customs in use under Henry I ; and again he declined 
doing anything unconditionally. Then the king ordered that they 
should be reduced to writing, having been first ascertained by rec- 
ognition. The recognitors, according to the formal record, were 
the archbishops, bishops, earls, barons, and most noble and ancient 
men of the kingdom; according to the archbishop, Richard de 
Lucy, the Justiciar and Jocelin de Bailleul, a French lawyer of 
whom little else is known, were the real authors of the document, 
which was presented as the result of the inquiry, and which has 
become famous under the name of the " Constitutions of Claren- 
don." 

The Constitutions of Clarendon are sixteen in number, and pur- 
port to be, as the history of their production shows them to have 
been, a report of the usages of Henry I on the disputed points. 
They concern questions of advowson and presentation, churches 
in the king's gift, the trial of clerks, the security to be taken of the 
excommunicated, the trial of laymen for spiritual offences, the 
excommunication of tenants-in-chief, the license of the clergy 
to go abroad, ecclesiastical appeals, which are not to go farther 
than the archbishop without the consent of the king; questions 
of the title to ecclesiastical estates, the baronial duties of the prelates, 
the election to bishoprics and abbacies, the right of the king to the 
goods of felons deposited under the protection of the Church, and 
the ordination of villeins. Such of these as are of importance to 
our subject may be noticed elsewhere; it is enough at present 
to remark that, while some of the Constitutions only state in legal 
form the customs which had been adopted by the Conqueror and 
his sons, others of them seem to be developments or expansions 
of such customs, in forms and with applications that belong to a 
much more advanced state of the law. The baronial status of 
the bishops is unreservedly asserted, the existence of the curia 
regis as a tribunal of regular resort, the right of the bishops to 
sit with the other barons in the curia until a question of blood 
occurs, the use of juries of twelve men of the vicinity for criminal 
causes and for recognition of claims to land, all these are stated 
in such a way as to show that the jurisprudence of which they were 
a part was known to the country at large. Accordingly, the 
institution of the Great Assize — the edict by which the king 
empowered the litigant who wished to avoid the trial by battle to 
obtain a recognition of his right by inquest of jury — must be sup- 
posed to have been issued at an earlier period of the reign; and 



Reforms in Church and State under Henry II 101 

the use of the jury of accusation, which is mentioned in the laws 
of ^thelred but only indistinctly traceable later, must have been 
revived before the year 1 164. And if this be so, the Constitutions of 
Clarendon assume a character which the party statements of Becket's 
biographers have not allowed them. They are no mere engine of 
tyranny, or secular spite against a churchman: they are really 
a part of a great scheme of administrative reform, by which the 
debatable ground between the spiritual and temporal powers can 
be brought within the reach of common justice, and the lawless- 
ness arising from professional jealousies abolished. That they 
were really this, and not an occasional weapon of controversy, may 
be further inferred from the rapidity with which they were drawn 
up, the completeness of their form, and the fact that notwithstand- 
ing the storm that followed, they formed the groundwork of the 
later customary practice in all such matters. 

To Becket, however, and his followers they presented themselves 
in no such light. The archbishop had come the year before from 
the Council of Tours in an excited state of mind, of which the 
Council of Woodstock saw the first evidence. He, best of all men, 
must have known the beneficial effects which the kingdom at large 
had experienced from the king's legal measures. Yet he declared 
them to be incompatible with the freedom of the clergy. At last, 
moved by the entreaties of his brethren, whom the king's threats 
had frightened, he declared his acceptance of the Constitutions; 
but with so much reluctance and with so many circumstances on 
which no consistent testimony is attainable, that the impression 
given at the time was that he was temporizing, if not dealing deceit- 
fully. He sent immediately to ask the forgiveness of the pope, as 
having betrayed the interests of the Church. 

§ 5. Despair and Flight of Becket 

From this moment the intrigues of the archbishop's enemies, 
intrigues for which his own conduct had given the opportunity, 
although it afforded no justification, left him no rest. In vain he 
appealed to the king : Henry was too deeply wounded to forgive, 
and was too determined on his own policy of reform to think of 
yielding; and the courtiers were resolved that no reconciliation 
should take place. In the following October a council was called 
at Northampton, to which the archbishop was summoned, not, 
as was the custom, by the first summons issued specially to him 
as the first counsellor of the crown, but by a common summons 



io2 English Historians 

addressed to the sheriff of Kent and ordering him to cite the arch- 
bishop to answer the claims of John the Marshall. At that council 
his ruin was completed ; he was overwhelmed by the king's demand 
that he should produce the accounts of the chancery, and by the 
charges of his enemies. In despair of justice, in fear of his life, 
or in the new ambition of finishing the third phase of his career 
by exile or martyrdom, he fled from Northampton and soon after 
took refuge in France where, partly by threats of spiritual pun- 
ishment, partly by intrigues, and partly by invoking the legal inter- 
ference of a pope who had little sympathy with his sufferings, he 
conducted a struggle which fills the chronicles of the next six years. 
During the greatest part of this time Henry also was absent from 
England. He paid a hurried visit to Normandy in 1165, and on 
his return made his third expedition to Wales. Early in 11 66 he 
held a council of the clergy at Oxford, and a great assembly of the 
bishops and baronage at Clarendon. He had just negotiated a 
marriage for his eldest daughter with Henry the Lion, Duke of 
Saxony, who was now in close alliance with Frederic Barbarossa, 
and was supposed to be intending to join the party of the anti-pope. 
Harassed by the attacks of Becket, in want of money for the dowry 
of his daughter, invited by the emperor to join the schismatic party, 
committed to it by his own envoys, and drawn back from such a 
gross mistake by Earl Robert of Leicester, the Justiciar, who refused 
the kiss of peace to the Archbishop of Cologne when acting as the 
imperial ambassador, Henry showed himself still the master of the 
situation. 

§ 6. The Assize of Clarendon 

It is to this period that we owe the Assize of Clarendon which 
remodelled the provincial administration of justice, and the valu- 
able series of documents which are contained in the Black Book 
of the Exchequer. Immediately after the Council of Clarendon the 
king went to France, where he was employed in the acquisition 
of Brittany and in counteracting the intrigues of Becket until 
March, 11 70. In these years he lost some of his oldest coun- 
sellors: the empress in 1167, Geoffrey de Mandeville in 1166, Earl 
Robert of Leicester in 1168, and Bishop Nigel of Ely in 1169. He 
had, however, now gained sufficient experience in affairs to be inde- 
pendent of his ministers : he never again submitted to the advice 
of a friend such as Becket had been ; and in the family of the old 
ministers of the Exchequer he found a number of trained clerks 



Reforms in Church and State under Henry II 103 

who, without aspiring to influential places in the government, were 
skilful and experienced in every department of ministerial work. 
Bishop Nigel had left a son for whom he had purchased, in 11 59, 
the office of treasurer, Richard Fitz-Neal, the author of the Dia- 
logus de Scaccario, afterwards bishop of London. Another of his 
clerks, probably a kinsman, earned an unhappy notoriety during 
the Becket quarrel as Richard of Ilchester; he was a man of 
consummate skill in diplomacy as well as finance, acted as justiciar 
of Normandy, and was constantly employed as a justice and baron 
of the Exchequer at home. The office of chancellor was not filled 
up during Becket's life, some distinguished chaplain of the king 
usually acting as protonotary, vice-chancellor, or keeper of the 
seal. The office of justiciar was retained by Richard de Lucy, 
whose fidelity to the king, notwithstanding his devotion to the 
memory of Becket, and his frank determination, where he could, 
to assert the rights of the nation, earned him the honorable title 
of Richard de Lucy the Loyal. 

The credit of having drawn up the Assize of Clarendon must 
be divided between the king and his advisers. Whether or no 
it owes some part of its importance to the loss of the legal enact- 
ments that had -preceded it, it is the most important document of 
the nature of law, or edict, that has appeared since the Conquest ; 
and, whether it be regarded in its bearing on legal history, or in its 
ultimate constitutional results, it has the greatest interest. The 
council in which it was passed is described as consisting of the arch- 
bishops, bishops, abbots, earls, and barons of all England ; Becket, 
however, was not present, and the assembly probably, amongst 
its minor acts, issued some sentence against him and his relations. 
The Assize contains no mention of him. It is arranged in twenty- 
two articles, which were furnished to the judges about to make a 
general provincial visitation. Of these, the first six describe the 
manner in which the presentment of criminals to the courts of the 
justices or the sheriff is henceforth to be made. Inquest is to be 
held, and juries of twelve men of the hundred, and four men of the 
township, are to present all persons accused of felony by public 
report ; these are to go to the ordeal, and to fare as that test may 
determine. By the other articles all men are directed to attend 
the county courts, and to join, if required, in these presentments; 
no franchise is to exclude the justices, and no one may entertain 
a stranger for whom he will not be responsible before them ; an 
acknowledgment made before the hundred court cannot be with- 
drawn before the justices: even the result of the ordeal is not to 



104 English Historians 

save from banishment the man of bad character who has been 
presented by the inquest; one sheriff is to assist another in the 
pursuit and capture of fugitives. The sessions of the justices are 
to be held in full county court. Two curious articles touching the 
ecclesiastical relations of the State follow; no convent or college 
is to receive any of the mean people into its body without good 
testimony as to character, and the heretics condemned at the recent 
Council of Oxford are to be treated as outlaws. The Assize is to 
hold good so long as the king shall please. 

In this document we may observe several marks of the per- 
manence of the old common law of the country. Not only is the 
agency of the shire-moot and hundred-moot — the four best men 
of the township, and the lord with his steward — applied to the 
execution of the edict, but the very language of the ancient laws 
touching strangers and fugitive felons is repeated. The inquest 
itself may be native or Norman, but there is no doubt as to the 
character of the machinery by which it is to be transacted. In the 
article which directs the admission of the justices into every fran- 
chise may be detected one sign of the anti-feudal policy which the 
king had all his life to maintain. 

§ 7. Judicial Visitations 

The visitation took place in the spring and summer of 11 66; 
two justices, the Earl of Essex and Richard de Lucy, travelled over 
the whole country, and the proceeds of their investigations swell 
the accounts of the Pipe Roll of the year to an unusual size. The 
enormous receipts under the heads of placita, the chattels of those 
who failed in the ordeal, fines exacted from the men who refused 
to swear under the king's assize, the goods of those hanged under 
the Assize of Clarendon, the expenses of the jails which the Assize 
ordered to be built or to be put in good repair, mark the accounts 
of this and several succeeding years. These entries, which have 
nothing corresponding with them in the rolls of the earlier years, 
seem to suggest the conclusion that the act from which they re- 
sulted was really a great measure of innovation: an attempt to 
invigorate the local administration of justice, and the initiative 
measure of a newly developed principle of judicial process, a dis- 
tinct step forwards in the policy of bringing the royal jurisdiction 
into close connection with the popular courts, and thus training 
the nation to the concentration of the powers of the people in the 
representative Parliaments of later ages. 



Reforms in Church and State under Henry II 105 

The immediate results of the Assize were by no means transient ; 
the visitation of 11 66 was followed by an itinerant survey of the 
forests in 1167, and in 11 68 by a thorough circuit of the shires, 
held by the barons of the Exchequer mainly for the purpose of 
collecting the aid which Henry demanded for the marriage of his 
eldest daughter. It is not improbable that the discussion of this 
aid took place in the Council of Clarendon in 11 66, for Henry was 
not in England between that date and the time when the money 
was collected; but it is possible that it was taken as a matter of 
course under the recognized feudal principles in such cases. The 
assessment was one mark on the knight's fee; and the number 
of knights' fees on which it was assessed was certified by the land- 
owners themselves. The collection of the money occupied the 
barons for two years, and, as appears from the action of the next 
year, did not satisfy the king, whilst it called forth great complaints 
on the part of the people. The visitation of the barons was used 
for judicial as well as financial purposes, the sheriffs had great 
opportunity of enforcing justice as well as of making perquisites, 
and the exaction, following so close on the severe assize of 11 66 led 
men not unreasonably to regard the mechanism employed for the 
repression of crime as one of a series of expedients for increas- 
ing the receipts of the Exchequer. The murmurs of the people 
reached the king in Normandy; and he had by this time other 
reasons for paying a visit to England. 

§ 8. The Inquest of Sheriffs 

He was now thoroughly weary of the Becket controversy, and 
the pertinacious underhand hostility of Lewis VII. He had suc- 
ceeded in compelling the Bretons to submit to Geoffrey, his third 
son, whom he had married to the heiress of Count Conan; and 
he was anxious to obtain for his son Henry the right to govern 
England as viceroy or sharer in the rights of the crown, which 
could be conferred only by the rite of coronation. With this 
object in view he returned in March, 11 70, and held a great court 
at Easter at Windsor, and another immediately after at London. 
In the second assembly, which coincided probably with the Easter 
session of the Exchequer, he, by an extraordinary act of authority, 
removed all the sheriffs of the kingdom from their offices, and 
issued a commission of inquiry into their receipts, which was to 
report to him on the 14th of June, the day fixed for the coronation 
of the younger Henry. The commission of inquiry, the text of 



106 English Historians 

which is extant, contains thirteen articles, which specify both the 
matters to be investigated and the particular method by which 
the information is to be obtained. The barons to whom it is 
intrusted are to take the oaths of all the barons, knights, and free- 
holders of each county, and to receive their evidence as to the 
receipts of the sheriffs and the whole staff of their servants, of 
the bishops and the whole host of their temporal officers, of all the 
special administrators of the royal demesne, of the itinerant officers 
of the Exchequer, and of all others who have had the opportunity 
of touching the public money; in particular, inquiry is to be made 
into the execution of the Assize of Clarendon, whether it has been 
justly enforced, and whether the officers employed in it have taken 
bribes or hush money ; into the collection of the aid pur fille warier, 
and into the profits of the forests ; a supplementary article directs 
inquiry into the cases in which homage due to the king and his son 
has not been paid. The great amount of business which thus 
accrued could not be despatched in so short a time by the same 
staff of officers ; the inquest was taken by twelve ''barons errant," 
clerk and lay, in the counties nearest London, and by similar large 
commissions in the more distant shires ; they were probably com- 
posed mainly of the baronage of the district, who would naturally 
scrutinize with some jealousy the proceedings of both the sheriffs 
and the judges. The result was apparently the acquittal of the of- 
ficials ; whether or no this was obtained by purchase, no further pro- 
ceedings were taken against them, but the sheriffs were not restored 
to their sheriffdoms, and had no further opportunity given them 
of making their office a stepping-stone to greater wealth and posi- 
tion. Henry placed in the vacant magistracies the officers of the 
Exchequer whom he knew and trusted, adopting in this respect 
the plan of his grandfather, who had used his judges for sheriffs, 
although he avoided throwing too many of the counties into any 
single hand ; the curia regis and the shire thus are brought closer 
together than ever, whilst a blow is struck at the local influence 
of the feudal lords. 

§ 9. The Death of Becket 

The Whitsuntide of 11 70 was, however, marked by a more criti- 
cal event than the inquest of sheriffs. The heir was crowned as 
Henry III ; the ceremony was performed not by Thomas of Canter- 
bury, but by Roger of York, and the wife of the young king was not 
crowned with him. This act, which was intended by Henry as a 



Reforms in Church and State under Henry II 107 

sign and seal of power, was a most unfortunate mistake. He had, 
not unnaturally, supposed that it would strengthen the supreme 
authority to have in each division of his dominions a sufficient 
representative of royal majesty ; he found that he had placed a 
dangerous weapon in the hands of an undutiful son. The minor 
irregularities of the coronation day roused his enemies to frenzy; 
Thomas Becket asserted that the rights of Canterbury, of the Eng- 
lish Church, of Christianity itself, were outraged by Archbishop 
Roger's intrusion; and Lewis VII, hurt at the neglect of his 
daughter, and backed by the support of the family of Champagne, 
who combined careful orthodoxy with intense hatred of the house 
of Anjou, urged the pope to put the kingdom under interdict. 
Before these invitations took effect, Henry, alarmed as he might 
well be, hastened into France, reconciled his long quarrel with the 
archbishop, and authorized his return. Becket returned in Decem- 
ber, excommunicated the opposing bishops, provoked the king to 
utter his angry and hasty wish to be rid of him, and expiated his 
imprudent and unchristian violence by a cruel death, on the 29th 
of December, 11 70. 

He was at once hailed as a martyr by Lewis VII and the house 
of Champagne ; the monks of Canterbury were ready to accept him 
as their patron saint after death, although they had cared little 
about him during his life; the tide of miracle began to flow im- 
mediately, and with it the tide of treason and disaffection around 
the person of the king. 

Henry's anger and horror at the murder of the archbishop — an 
act which showed in its perpetrators not only great brutality, but 
a profound disregard for the king's reputation and for the public 
safety — urged him to apply at once in self-defence to Rome. 
That done, he must keep out of the way of the hostile legation 
which had been despatched to Normandy. He collected his forces 
in the duchy, crossed to England in August, 1171, and thence to 
Ireland, where he remained, receiving the homages of the bishops 
and princes of that divided country, until he heard that the legates 
who were sent to absolve him had arrived in Normandy. This 
was in March, 1 172. On receiving the news he returned as rapidly 
as he had come, made his submission to the papal representatives, 
clearing himself by oath of all complicity in the death of Becket, 
renouncing the Constitutions of Clarendon, and swearing adhesion 
to Alexander III against the anti-pope. The submission was 
completed at Avranches in September. As one portion of the 
pacification, the younger Henry was crowned a second time, on 



108 English Historians 

this occasion in company with his wife, at Winchester instead of 
Westminster, and by the Archbishop of Rouen instead of the 
Archbishop of York. The long storm seemed to have ended in 
a profound calm. . . . 

§ 10. Henry II as King and Administrator 

The examination of the administrative measures of Henry in 
the order of their adoption is necessary to enable us to realize at 
once the development of his policy, and the condition of affairs 
which compelled it. Nor, although in the investigation much de- 
tail is needed which at first sight seems irrelevant to the later or to 
the more essential history of the Constitution, is the minute inquiry 
to be set aside as superfluous. Henry II was, it is true, far more 
than an inventor of legal forms or of the machinery of taxation. 
He was one of the greatest politicians of his time ; a man of such 
wide influence, great estates, and numerous connections, that the 
whole of the foreign relations of England during the Middle Ages 
may be traced directly and distinctly to the results of his alliances 
and his enmities. He was regarded by the Emperor Frederick, 
by the kings of Spain and Sicily, by the rising republics of Lom- 
bardy, by the half-savage dynasts of Norway, and by the fainting 
realm of Palestine, as a friend and a patron to be secured at any 
cost. He refused the crowns of Jerusalem and Sicily ; he refused 
to recognize the anti-pope at a moment when the whole influence of 
the papacy was being employed to embarrass and distress him. 
His career is full of romantic episodes, and of really great physical 
exploits. 

Yet the consent of the historians of the time makes him, first 
and foremost, a legislator and administrator. Ralph Niger, his 
enemy, tells how year after year he wore out men's patience with 
his annual assizes; how he set up an upstart nobility; how he 
abolished the ancient laws, set aside charters, overthrew munici- 
palities, thirsted for gold, overwhelmed all society with his scutages, 
his recognitions, and such like. Ralph de Diceto explains how 
necessary a constant adaptation and readjustment of means was to 
secure in any degree -the pure administration of justice, and lauds 
the promptness with which he discarded unsatisfactory measures 
to make way for new experiments. William of Newburgh and 
Peter of Blois praise him for the very measures that Ralph Niger 
condemns ; his exactions were far less than those of his successors ; 
he was most careful of the public peace ; he bore the sword for the 



Reforms in Church and State under Henry II 109 

punishment of evil-doers, but to the peace of the good ; he con- 
served the rights and liberties of the Church ; he never imposed 
any heavy tax on either England or his continental estates, or 
grieved the Church with undue exactions; his legal activity was 
especially meritorious after the storm of anarchy which preceded. 
In every description of his character the same features recur, 
whether as matters of laudation or of abuse. 

The question already asked recurs, How many of the innovating 
expedients of his policy were his own? Some parts of it bear a 
startling resemblance to the legislation of the Frank emperors, his 
institution of scutage, his assize of arms, his inquest of sheriffs, the 
whole machinery of the jury which he developed and adapted to so 
many different sorts of business — almost all that is distinctive 
of his genius is formed upon Karolingian models, the very existence 
of which within the circle of his studies or of his experience we are 
at a loss to account for. It is probable that international studies 
in the universities had attained already an important place; that 
the revived study of the Roman law had invited men to the more 
comprehensive examination of neighboring jurisprudence. But 
whilst the Roman law met with a cold reception in England, and 
whilst the minutiae of feudal legislation as it was then growing up 
gained admission only at a later period, and were under Henry 
repressed rather than encouraged, we here and there come across 
glimpses of the imperial system which had died out on the soil 
from which it sprang. 

Bibliographical Note • 

Stubbs, Historical Introductions to the Rolls Series. Maitland, Canon Law 
in England, pp. 132 ff., on Henry II and the clergy. Stephens, History 0) 
the English Church, 1066-1272, for Henry and the Church. Mrs. John 
Richard Green, Henry II. Kate Norgate, England under the Angevin Kings. 
Ramsay, The Angevin Empire. Adams, Political History of England, 1066- 
1216, chaps, xiii-xv. For the condition of the realm on the accession of 
Henry II, Round, Geoffrey de Mandeville. The important documents are 
to be found in Adams and Stephens, Select' Documents of English Constitu- 
tional History. 



CHAPTER V 

THE TRUE NATURE OF MAGNA CARTA 

No document in the history of institutions is more famous than 
Magna Carta. Generation after generation of Englishmen looked 
back upon it as the fountain of their liberties and read into its 
general clauses the authority for new claims and privileges which 
rose from time to time. As a result of this re-reading of the Charter 
in the light of the interests of succeeding ages, there grew up around 
it a mass of tradition that obscured its original meaning. It is 
comparatively recently that scholars have begun to recognize that 
the document must be studied, not in the light of modern ideas on 
personal, civil, and political rights, but rather in the light of medi- 
aeval law and custom. A casual reading of the document will lead 
to innumerable erroneous conclusions ; each clause is thorny with 
difficult problems; and the fundamental character of the docu- 
ment itself is in dispute. The most recent and authoritative com- 
mentary on Magna Carta is by Dr. McKechnie, to whose work 
every cautious student will turn before venturing hasty conclusions 
on the meaning of the respective clauses. 

§ i. Former Views on the Character of Magna Carta 1 

Does the Great Charter really, as the orthodox traditional view 
so vehemently asserts, protect the rights of the whole mass of hum- 
ble Englishmen equally with those of the proudest noble? Is it 
really a great bulwark of the constitutional liberties of the nation, 
considered as a nation, in any broad sense of that word ? Or is 
it rather, in the main, a series of concessions to feudal selfishness 
wrung from the king by a handful of powerful aristocrats? On 
such questions, learned opinion is sharply divided, although an 

1 McKechnie, Magna Carta, pp. 130 ff. By permission of Dr. McKechnie 
and The Macmillan Company, New York. 

1 10 



The True Nature of Magna Carta in 

overwhelming majority of authorities range themselves on the pop- 
ular side, from Coke (who assumes in every page of his Second 
Institute that the rights won in 1 2 1 5 were as valuable for the villein 
as for the baron) down to writers of the present day. Lord Chat- 
ham, in one of his great orations, insisted that the barons who 
wrested the Charter from John established claims to the gratitude 
of posterity because they "did not confine it to themselves alone, 
but delivered it as a common blessing to the whole people"; and 
Sir Edward Creasy, in citing Chatham's words with approval, caps 
them with more ecstatic words of his own, declaring that one effect 
of the Charter was "to give and to guarantee full protection for 
property and person to every human being that breathes English 
air." Lord Chatham, indeed, spoke with the unrestrained en- 
thusiasm of an orator ; yet staid lawyers and historians like Black- 
stone and Hallam seem to vie with him in similar expressions. 
"An equal distribution of civil rights to all classes of freemen forms 
the peculiar beauty of the charter," so we are told by Hallam. 
Bishop Stubbs unequivocally enunciated the same doctrine. 
"Clause by clause the rights of the commons are provided for as 
well as the rights of the nobles. . . . This proves, if any proof 
were wanted, that the demands of the barons were no selfish 
exactions of privilege for themselves." 

Dr. Gneist is of the same opinion. "Magna Carta was a pledge 
of reconciliation between all classes. Its existence and ratifica- 
tion maintained for centuries the notion of fundamental rights as 
applicable to all classes in the consciousness that no liberties 
would be upheld by the superior classes for any length of time, 
without guarantees of personal liberties for the humble also." 

"The rights which the barons claimed for themselves," says 
John Richard Green, before proceeding to enumerate them, 
"they claimed for the nation at large." The testimony of a very 
recent writer, Dr. Hannis Taylor, may close this series. "As 
all three orders participated equally in its fruits, the great act 
at Runnymede was in the fullest sense of the term a national act, 
and not a mere act of the baronage on behalf of their own special 
privileges." It would be easy to add to this "cloud of witnesses," 
but enough has been said to prove that it has been a common 
boast of Englishmen, for many centuries, that the provisions of 
the Great Charter were intended to secure, and did secure, the 
liberties of every class and individual of the nation, not merely 
those of the feudal magnates on whose initiative the quarrel was 
raised. 



112 English Historians 

It must not be forgotten, however, that the truth of historical 
questions does not depend on the counting of votes, or the weight 
of authority; nor that a vigorous minority has always protested 
on the other side. "It has been lately the fashion," Hallam con- 
fesses, "to depreciate the value of Magna Carta, as if it had 
sprung from the private ambition of a few selfish barons, and 
redressed only some feudal abuses." It is not safe to accept, 
without a careful consideration of the evidence, the opinions cited 
even from such high* authorities. "Equality" is essentially a 
modern ideal: in 1215, the various estates of the realm may have 
set out on the journey which was ultimately to lead them to this 
conception, but they had not yet reached their goal. For many 
centuries after the thirteenth, class legislation maintained its 
prominent place on the Statute Rolls, and the interests of the 
various classes were by no means always identical. 

§ 2. Who Were "Freemen" in 1215 

Two different parts of the Charter have a bearing on this ques- 
tion; namely, chapter 1, which explains to whom the rights were 
granted, and chapter 61, which declares by whom they were to 
be enforced. John's words clearly tell us that the liberties were 
confirmed "to all the freemen of my kingdom and their heirs 
forever." This opens up the crucial question, — Who were 
freemen in 1215? 

The enthusiasm, natural and even laudable in its proper place, 
although fatal to historical accuracy in its results, which seeks to 
enhance the merits of Magna Carta by exalting its provisions, and ex- 
tending their scope as widely as possible, has led commentators to 
stretch the meaning of ' ' freemen " to its utmost limits. The word has 
even been treated as embracing the entire population of England, 
including not only churchmen, merchants, and yeomen, but even 
villeins as well. There are reasons, however, for believing that 
it should be understood in a sense much more restricted, although 
the subject is darkened by the vagueness of the word, and by the 
difficulty of determining whether it bears any technical signifi- 
cation or not. "Homo," in mediaeval law-Latin, has a peculiar 
meaning, and was originally used as synonymous with "baro" 
— all feudal vassals, whether of the crown or of mesne lords, 
being described as "men" or "barons." The word was some- 
times indeed more loosely used, as may have been the case in 
chapter 1. Yet Magna Carta is a feudal charter, and the pre- 



The True Nature of Magna Carta 113 

sumption is in favor of the technical feudal meaning of the word 
— a presumption certainly not weakened by the addition of an 
adjective confining it to the "free." This qualifying word cer- 
tainly excluded villeins, and possibly also the great burgess class, 
or many of them. 

There is a passage in the Dialogus de Scaccario (dating from 
the close of the reign of Henry II) in which Richard Fitz-Nigel 
reckons even the richest burgesses and traders as not fully free. 
He discusses the legal position of any knight {miles) or other 
freeman {liber homo), losing his status by engaging in commerce 
in order to make money. This does not prove that rich towns- 
men were ranked with the villani of the rural districts; but it 
does raise a serious doubt whether in the strict legal language 
of feudal charters the words liberi homines would be interpreted 
by contemporary lawyers as including the trading classes. Such 
doubts are strengthened by a narrow scrutiny of those passages 
of the Charter in which the term occurs. In chapter 34 the liber 
homo is, apparently, assumed to be a landowner with a private 
manorial jurisdiction of which he may be deprived. In other 
words, he is the holder of a freehold estate of some extent — a 
great barony or, at the least, a manor. In this part of the Char- 
ter the "freeman" is clearly a county gentleman. 

Is the "freeman" of chapter 1 something different? The 
question must be considered an open one; but much might be 
said in favor of the opinion that "freeman" as used in the Char- 
ter is synonymous with "freeholder"; and that therefore only 
a limited class could, as grantees or the heirs of such, make good 
a legal claim to share in the liberties secured by Magna Carta, 

§ 3. The Character 0} the Men Bound to Enforce the Charter 

To the question, Who had authority to enforce its provisions ? the 
Great Charter has likewise a clear answer ; namely, a select band 
or quasi-committee of twenty-five barons. Although the mayor 
of London was chosen among their number, it is clear that no 
strong support for any democratic interpretation of Magna Carta 
can be founded on the choice of executors, since these formed a 
distinctly aristocratic body. Yet this tendency to vest power ex- 
clusively in an oligarchy composed of the heads of great families 
may have been counteracted, so it is possible to contend, by the 
invitation extended by the same chapter to the communa totius 
terra to assist the twenty-five executors against the king in the 
1 



114 English Historians 

event of his breaking faith. Unfortunately, the extreme vague- 
ness of the phrase makes it rash in a high degree to' build conclu- 
sions on such foundations. It is possible to interpret the words 
communa totius terrce as applying merely to "the community of 
freeholders of the land," or even to "the community of barons 
of the land," as well as to "the community of all the estates 
(including churchmen, merchants, and commons) of the land," 
as is usually done on no authority save conjecture. Every body 
of men was known in the thirteenth century as a communa; a 
word of exceedingly loose connotation. 

§ 4. Relation of the Charter to the Classes 

So far, our investigations by no means prove that the equality 
of all classes, or the equal participation by all in the privileges 
of the Charter, was an ideal, consciously or unconsciously, held 
by the leaders of the revolt, against King John. Magna Carta 
itself contains evidences which point the other way; namely, to 
the existence of class legislation. At the beginning and end of the 
Charter, clauses are carefully inserted to secure to the Church 
its "freedom" and privileges; churchmen, in their special in- 
terests, must be safeguarded, whoever else may suffer. "Benefit 
of clergy," thus secured, implies the very opposite of "equality 
before the law." Other interests also receive separate and privi- 
leged treatment. Many, perhaps most, of the chapters have no 
value except to landowners; a few affect tradesmen and towns- 
men exclusively, while chapters 20 to 22 adopt distinct sets of 
rules for the amercement of the ordinary freeman, the churchman, 
and the earl or baron, respectively — an anticipation, almost, of 
the later division into the three estates of the realm — commons, 
clergy, and lords temporal. A careful distinction is occasionally 
made (for example, in chapter 20) between the freeman and the 
villein, and the latter (as will be proved later on) was carefully 
excluded from many of the benefits conferred on others by Magna 
Carta. In this connection it is interesting to consider how each 
separate class would have been affected if John's promises had 
been loyally kept. 

(1) The Feudal Aristocracy. — Even a casual glance at the 
clauses of the Great Charter shows how prominently abuses of 
feudal rights and obligations bulked in the eyes of its promoters. 
Provisions of this type must be considered chiefly as concessions 
to the feudal aristocracy, although it is true that the relief 



The True Nature of Magna Carta 115 

primarily intended for them indirectly benefited other classes 
as well. 

(2) Churchmen. — The position of the Church is easily under- 
stood when we neglect the privileges enjoyed by its great men 
qua barons rather than qua prelates. The special Church clauses 
found no place whatsoever in the Articles of the Barons, but bear 
every appearance of having been tacked on as an after-thought, 
due probably to the influence of Stephen Langton. Further, they 
are mainly confirmatory of the separate Charter already twice 
granted within the few preceding months. The National Church 
indeed, with all its patriotism, had been careful to secure its own 
selfish advantages before the political crisis arrived. 

(3) Tenants of Mesne Lords. — When raising troops with the 
object of compelling John to grant Magna Carta by parade of 
armed might, the barons were perforce obliged to rely on the loyal 
support of their own freeholders. It was essential that the knights 
and others who held under them should be ready to fight for their 
mesne lords rather than for the king, their lord paramount. It 
was thus absolutely necessary that these under-tenants should 
receive some recognition of their claims in the provisions of ' the 
final settlement. Concessions conceived in their favor are con- 
tained in two clauses (couched apparently in no specially generous 
spirit) ; namely, chapters 1 5 and 60. The former limits the num- 
ber of occasions on which aids might be extorted from subtenants 
by their mesne lords to the same three as were recognized in the 
case of the crown. Less than this the barons could scarcely 
have granted. Chapter 60 provides generally, in vague words, 
that all the customs and liberties which John agrees to observe 
towards his vassals shall be also observed by mesne lords, whether 
prelates or laymen, towards their subvassals. This provision 
has met with a chorus of applause from modern writers. Professor 
Prothero declares that " the subtenant was in all cases as scrupu- 
lously protected as the tenant-in-chief." Dr. Hannis Taylor 
is even more enthusiastic. "Animated by a broad spirit of gen- 
erous patriotism, the barons stipulated in the treaty that every 
limitation imposed for their protection upon the feudal rights of 
the king should also be imposed upon their rights as mesne lords 
in favor of the under-tenants who held them." It must, how- 
ever, be remembered that a vague general clause affords less pro- 
tection than a definite specific privilege; and that in a rude age 
such a general declaration of principle might readily be infringed 
when occasion arose. The barons were compelled to do some- 



n6 English Historians 

thing, or to pretend to do something, for their under-tenants. 
Apparently they did as little as they, with safety or decency, 
could. 

(4) Something was also done for the merchant and trading 
classes, but, when we subtract what has been read into the Charter 
by democratic enthusiasts of later ages, not so much as might rea- 
sonably be expected in a truly national document. The existing 
privileges of the great city of London were confirmed, without 
specification, in the Articles of the Barons; and some slight re- 
forms in favor of its citizens (not too definitely worded) were 
then added. An attentive examination seems to suggest, how- 
ever, that these privileges were carefully refined away when the 
Articles were reduced to their final form in Magna Carta. The 
right to tallage London and other towns was carefully reserved 
to the crown, while the rights of free trading granted to foreigners 
were clearly inconsistent with the policy of monopoly and protec- 
tion dear to the hearts of the Londoners. A mere confirmation 
to the citizens of existing customs, already bought and paid for 
at a great price, seems but a poor return for the support given by 
them to the movement of insurrection at a critical moment when 
John was bidding high on the opposite side, and when their ad- 
herence was sufficient to turn the scale. The marvel is that so 
little was done for them. 

(5) The relation of the villein to the benefits of the Charter has 
been hotly discussed. Coke claims for him, in regard to the im- 
portant provisions of chapter 39 at least, that he must be regarded 
as a liber homo, and therefore as a full participant in all the ad- 
vantages of this clause. This contention is not well founded. 
Even admitting the relativity of the word liber in the thirteenth 
century, and admitting also that the villein performed some of 
the duties, if he enjoyed none of the rights of the free-born, still 
the formal description liber homo, when used in a feudal charter, 
cannot be stretched to cover those useful manorial chattels that 
had no recognized place in the feudal scheme of society or in the 
political constitution of England, however necessary they might 
be in the scheme of the particular manor to the soil of which they 
were attached. 

Even if we exclude the villein from the general benefits of the 
grant, it may be, and has been, maintained that some few privi- 
leges were insured to him in his own name. One clause, at least, 
is specially framed for his protection. The villein, so it is pro- 
vided in chapter 21, must not be so cruelly amerced as to leave 



The True Nature of Magna Carta 117 

him utterly destitute; his plough and its equipment must be 
saved to him. Such concessions, however, are quite consistent 
with a denial of all political rights, and even of all civil rights, 
as these are understood in a modern age. The Crown and the 
magnates, so it may be urged, were only consulting their own 
interests when they left the villein the means to carry on his farm- 
ing operations, and so to pay off the balance of his debts in the 
future. The closeness of his bond to the lord of his manor made 
it impossible to crush the one without slightly injuring the other. 
The villein was protected, not as the acknowledged subject of 
legal rights, but because he formed a valuable asset of his lord. 
This attitude is illustrated by a somewhat peculiar expression 
used in chapter 4, which prohibited injury to the estate of a ward 
by " waste of men or things." For a guardian to raise a villein to 
the status of a freeman was to benefit the enfranchised peasant 
at the expense of his young master. 

Other clauses both of John's Charter and of the various re- 
issues show scrupulous care to avoid infringing the rights of prop- 
erty enjoyed by manorial lords over their villeins. The king could 
not amerce other people's villeins harshly, although those on his 
own farms might be amerced at his discretion. Chapter 16 
while carefully prohibiting any arbitrary increase of service from 
freehold property, leaves by inference all villein holdings unpro- 
tected. Then the "farms" or rents of ancient demesne might 
be arbitrarily raised by the crown, and tallages might be arbi- 
trarily taken (measures likely to press hardly on the villein class). 
The villein was deliberately left exposed to the worst forms of 
purveyance, from which chapters 28 and 30 rescued his betters. 
The horses and implements of the villanus were still at the mercy 
of the crown's purveyors. The re-issue of 121 7 confirms this 
view; while demesne wagons were protected, those of the vil- 
leins were left exposed. Again, the chapter which takes the place 
of the famous chapter 39 of 1215 makes it clear that lands held 
in villeinage are not to be protected from arbitrary disseizin or 
dispossession. The villein was left by the common law merely 
a tenant-at-will, — subject to arbitrary ejectment by his lord, — 
whatever meagre measure of protection he might obtain under 
the "custom of the manor," as interpreted by the court of the lord 
who oppressed him. 

Even if it were possible to neglect the significance of any one 
of these somewhat trivial points, when all of them are placed side 
by side, their meaning is clear. . If the bulk of the English peas- 



1 1 8 English Historians 

antry were protected at all by Magna Carta, that was merely be- 
cause they formed valuable assets of their lords. The Charter 
viewed them as "villeins regardant" — as chattels attached to 
a manor, not as members of an English commonwealth. 

The general conclusion to be derived from this survey is that, 
while much praise may be due to the baronial leaders for their 
comparatively liberal interest in the rights of others, they are 
scarcely entitled to the excessive laudation they have sometimes 
received. 

The rude beginnings of many features which have since come 
into prominence in English institutions (such as the concep- 
tions of patriotism and nationality, and the principles of equality 
before the law, and the tender regard for the rights of the humble) 
may possibly be found in the germ in some parts of the completed 
Charter; but the Articles of the Barons were what their name 
implies, — a baronial manifesto, seeking chiefly to redress the 
grievances of the promoters, and mainly selfish in motive. 

§ 5. The Great Charter as a Prominent Landmark 

Yet, when all deductions have been made (and it has seemed 
necessary to do this with emphasis in order to redress the false 
balance created by the exaggerations of enthusiasts), the Great 
Charter still stands out as a prominent landmark in the sequence 
of events which have led in an unbroken chain to the consolida- 
tion of the English nation, and to the establishment of a free and 
constitutional form of polity upon a basis so enduring that, after 
more than eight centuries of growth, it still retains the vigor and 
buoyance of youth. 

No evidence survives to show that the men of John's reign 
placed any excessive or exaggerated importance on the Great 
Charter ; but, without a break since then, the estimate of its worth 
steadily increased until it came to be regarded almost as a fetich 
among English lawyers and historians. No estimate of its value 
can be too high, and no words too emphatic or glowing to satisfy 
its votaries. In many a time of national crisis, Magna Carta 
has been confidently appealed to as a fundamental law too sacred 
to be altered — as a talisman containing some magic spell, capable 
of averting national calamity. 

Are these estimates of its value justified by facts, or are they 
gross exaggerations? Did it really create an epoch in English 
history ? If so, wherein did its importance exactly lie ? 



The True Nature of Magna Carta 119 



§ 6. Intrinsic Merits oj the Charter 

The numerous factors which contributed towards the worth of 
Magna Carta may be distinguished as of two kinds, intrinsic and 
extrinsic. (1) Its intrinsic value depends on the nature of its 
own provisions. The reforms demanded by the barons and granted 
by this Charter were just and moderate. The avoidance of all 
extremes tended towards a permanent settlement, since modera- 
tion both gains and keeps adherents. Its aims were practical 
as well as moderate; the language in which they were framed, 
clear and straightforward. A high authority has described the 
Charter as "an intensely practical document." This practi- 
cality is an essentially English characteristic, and strikes the key- 
note of almost every great movement for reform which has held 
a permanent place in English history. Closely connected with 
this feature is another, the essentially legal nature of the whole. 
As Magna Carta was rarely absent from the minds of subsequent 
opponents of despotism, a practical and legal direction was thus 
given to the efforts of Englishmen in many ages. Therein lies 
another English characteristic. While democratic enthusiasts 
in France and America have often sought to found their rights 
and liberties on a lofty but unstable basis of philosophical theory 
embodied in Declarations of Rights, Englishmen have occupied 
lower but surer ground, aiming at practical remedies for actual 
wrongs, rather than enunciating theoretical platitudes with no 
realities to correspond. 

Another intrinsic merit of the Charter was that it made definite 
what had been vague before. Definition is a valuable protection 
for the weak against the strong ; whereas vagueness increases the 
powers of the tyrant who can interpret while he enforces the law. 
Misty rights were now reduced to a tangible form, and could no 
longer be broken with so great impunity. Magna Carta contained 
no crude innovations, and confirmed many principles whose 
value was enhanced by their antiquity. King John, in recognizing 
parts of the old Anglo-Saxon customary law, put himself in touch 
with national traditions and the past history of the nation. Fur- 
ther, the nature of the provisions bears witness to the broad basis 
on which the settlement was intended to be built. The Charter, 
notwithstanding the prominence given to the redress of feudal 
grievances, redressed other grievances as well. In this, the in- 
fluence of the Church, and notably of its primate, can be traced. 



120 English Historians 

Some little attention was given to the rights of the under-tenants 
also, and even to those of the merchants, while the villein and 
the alien were not left entirely unprotected. Thus the settlement 
contained in the Charter had a broad basis in the affection of all 
classes. 

§ 7. Possible Exaggeration of the Charter as a Triumph over 

A bsolutism 

(2) Part of the value of Magna Carta may be traced to extrin- 
sic causes; to the circumstances which gave it birth; to its 
vivid historical setting. The importance of each one of its pro- 
visions is emphasized by the object-lessons which accompanied 
its inauguration. The whole of Christendom was amazed by 
the spectacle of the king of a great nation obliged to surrender 
at discretion to his own subjects, and that, too, after he had scorn- 
fully rejected all suggestions of a compromise. The fact that John 
was compelled to accept the Charter meant a loss of royal prestige 
and also great encouragement to future rebels. What once had 
happened, might happen again; and the humiliation of the king 
was stamped as a powerful image on the minds of future genera- 
tions. 

Such considerations almost justify enthusiasts, who hold that 
the granting of Magna Carta was the turning-point in English 
history. Henceforward it was more difficult for the king to in- 
vade the rights of others. Where previously the vagueness of 
the law lent itself to invasion, its clear restatement and ratifica- 
tion in 1215 pinned down the king to a definite issue. He could 
no longer plead that he sinned in ignorance ; he must either keep 
the law or openly defy it — no middle course was possible. 

When all this has been said, it may still be doubted whether the 
belief of enthusiasts in the excessive importance of Magna Carta 
has been fully justified. Many other triumphs, almost equally 
important, have been won in the cause of liberty, and under cir- 
cumstances almost equally notable, and many statutes have been 
passed embodying these. Why, then, should Magna Carta be 
invariably extolled as the palladium of English liberties ? Is not, 
when all is said, the extreme merit attributed to it mainly of a 
sentimental . or imaginative nature ? Such questions must be an- 
swered partly in the affirmative. Much of its value does depend 
on sentiment. Yet all government is, in a sense, founded upon 
sentiment — sometimes affection, sometimes fear. 



The True Nature of Magna Carta 121 

Psychological considerations are all-powerful in the practical 
affairs of life. Intangible and even unreal phenomena have 
played an important part in the history of every nation. The 
tie that binds the British colonies at the present day to the mother 
country is largely one of sentiment ; yet the troopers from Canada 
and New Zealand who responded to the call of Britain in her hour 
of need produced practical results of an obvious nature. The 
element of sentiment in politics can never be ignored. 

§ 8. Value 0) the Charter to Later Generations 

It is no disparagement to Magna Carta, then, to confess that 
part of its powers has been read into it by later generations, and 
lies in the halo, almost of romance, which has gradually gathered 
round it in the course of centuries. It became a battle-cry for fu- 
ture ages, a banner, a rallying point, a stimulus to the imagination. 
For a king, thereafter, openly to infringe the promises contained 
in the Great Charter, was to challenge the bitterness of public 
opinion — to put himself palpably in the wrong. For an aggrieved 
man, however humble, to base his rights upon its terms was to 
enlist the warm sympathy of all. Time and again, from the 
Barons' War against Henry III, to the days of John Hampden 
and Oliver Cromwell, the possibility of appealing to the words 
of Magna Carta has afforded a practical ground for opposition; 
an easily intelligible principle to fight for; a fortified position to 
hold against the enemies of the national freedom. The exact 
way in which this particular document — dry as its details at 
first sight may seem — has, when considered as a whole, fired the 
popular imagination, is difficult to determine. Such a task lies 
rather within the sphere of the student of psychology than of the 
student of history, as usually conceived. However difficult it 
may be to explain this phenomenon, there is no doubt of its exist- 
ence. The importance of the Great Charter, originally flowing 
both from the intrinsic and from the extrinsic features already 
described, has greatly increased, as traditions, associations, and 
aspirations have clustered more thickly round it. These have 
augmented in each succeeding age the reverence in which it has 
been held, and have made ever more secure its hold upon the 
popular imagination. 

Thus Magna Carta, in addition to its legal value, has a 
political value of an equally emphatic kind. Apart from and 
beyond the salutary effect of the many useful laws it contained, 



122 English Historians 

its moral influence has contributed to a marked advance of the 
national spirit, and therefore of the national liberties. A few of 
the aspects of this advance deserve to be emphasized. The king, 
,by granting the Charter in solemn form, admitted that he was 
not an absolute ruler; admitted that he had a master over him 
in the laws which he had often violated, but which he now swore 
to obey. Magna Carta has thus been truly said to enunciate 
and inaugurate "the reign of law" or "the rule of law" in the 
phrase made famous by Professor Dicey. 

§ 9. The Charter as a " : Turning-point" 

It marks also the commencement of a new grouping of political 
forces in England ; indeed, without such an arrangement the win- 
ning of the Charter would have been impossible. Throughout 
the reign of Richard I the old tacit understanding between the 
king and the lower classes had been endangered by the heavy 
drain of taxation; but the actual break-up of the old alliance 
only came in the crisis of John's reign. Henceforward can be 
traced a gradual change in the balance of parties in the common- 
wealth. No longer are crown and people united, in the name of 
law and order, against the baronage, standing for feudal disinte- 
gration. The mass of humble free men and the Church are for 
the moment in league with the barons, in the name of law and 
order, against the crown, recently become the chief law-breaker. 

The possibility of the existence of such an alliance, even on a 
temporary basis, involved the adoption by its chief members of 
a new baronial policy. Hitherto each great baron had aimed at 
his own independence or aggrandizement, striving on the one hand 
to gain new franchises for himself, or to widen the scope of those 
he already had ; and on the other to weaken the king and to keep 
him outside these franchises. This policy, which succeeded both 
in France and in Scotland, had before John's reign already failed 
signally in England, and the English barons now, on the whole, 
came to admit the hopelessness of renewing the struggle for feu- 
dal independence. They substituted for this ideal of an earlier 
age a more progressive policy. The king, whose interference 
they could no longer hope completely to shake off, must at least 
be taught to interfere justly and according to rule ; he must walk 
only by law and custom, not by the caprices of his evil heart. 
The barons sought henceforward to control the royal power 
they could not exclude; they desired some determining share in 



The True Nature of Magna Carta 123 

the National Councils, if they could no longer hope to create little 
nations of their own within the four corners of their fiefs. Magna 
Carta was the fruit of this new policy. 

It has been often repeated, and with truth, that the Great Char- 
ter marks also a stage in the growth of national unity or nationality. 
Here, however, it is necessary to guard against exaggeration. It 
is merely one movement in a process, rather than a final achieve- 
ment. We must somewhat discount, while still agreeing in the 
main with, statements which declare the Charter to be " the first 
documentary proof of the existence of a united English nation " ; 
or with the often-quoted words of Dr. Stubbs, that "the Great 
Charter is the first great public act of the nation, after it has 
realized its own identity." 

A united English nation, whether conscious or unconscious of 
its identity, cannot be said to have existed in 1215, except under 
several qualifications. The conception of "nationality," in the 
modern sense, is of comparatively recent origin, and requires 
that the lower as well as the higher classes should be comprehended 
within its bounds. Further, the coalition which wrested the 
Charter from the royal tyrant was essentially of a temporary 
nature, and quickly fell to pieces again. Even while the alliance 
continued, the interests of the various classes, as has been already 
shown, were far from identical. Political rights were treated 
as the monopoly of the few (as is evidenced by the retrograde 
provisions of chapter 14 for the composition of the commune 
concilium) ; and civil rights were far from universally distributed. 
The leaders of the "national" movement certainly gave no politi- 
cal rights to the despised villeins, who comprised more than three- 
quarters of the entire population of England; while their civil 
rights were almost completely ignored in the provisions of the 
Charter. 

Magna Carta undoubtedly marked one step, an important 
step, in the process by which England became a nation; but that 
step was neither the first nor yet the final one. 

Bibliographical Note 
Stubbs, Constitutional History, Vol. I, pp. 569 ff. Pollock and Maitland, 
History of English Law, Vol. I, pp. 1 71-172. Adams, A Political History of 
England, 1066-12 16, chap, xxi; The Critical Period of English Constitu- 
tional History, in the American Historical Review, 1900, pp. 643 ff. Stubbs, 
Lectures on Early English History, chap. xx. Kate Norgate, John Lackland. 
Jenks, The Myth of Magna Carta, in the Independent Review, 1904, pp. 
260 ff. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE ORIGIN OF PARLIAMENT 

The attempts of the barons to control the actions of the crown 
by the definition of royal rights in Magna Carta were far from 
successful. Likewise the efforts of the barons to establish an 
oligarchy, such as that defined in the Provisions of Oxford 
and Westminster in the reign of Henry III, failed to secure 
satisfactory and stable government. The expenses of royal 
government were steadily increasing, the income under feudal 
prerogatives was inadequate as a source of revenue, and the 
amount of movable property as contrasted with landed prop- 
erty was increasing with the development of trading and 
industrial classes. In view of the stout resistance of the barons 
to arbitrary exactions, it appeared inevitable that the king, in 
order to reach the various sources of revenue within his realm, 
would have to call to his council the representatives of the domi- 
nant classes. One must say dominant classes, for, as we have 
seen, the peasants of England, for political purposes, were prac- 
tically non-existent. The best short account of just how the 
royal council was transformed into a representative assembly is 
given by Dr. Stubbs in his Select Charters, Where the student 
will find all the documents illustrating the course of this 
development. 

§ i. The Elements of Constitutional Government 1 

The idea of constitutional government, defined by the measures 
of Edward I, and summed up in the legal meaning of the word 
parliament, implies four principles: first, the existence of a 
central or national assembly, a commune concilium regni; 

1 Stubbs, Select Charters, pp. 36 ff. By permission of the Delegates of 
the Clarendon Press, Oxford. 

124 



The Origin of Parliament 125 

second, the representation in that assembly of all classes of the 
people regularly summoned; third, the reality of the representa- 
tion of the whole people, secured either by its presence in the coun- 
cil or by the free election of the persons who are to represent it 
or any portion of it ; and fourth, the assembly so summoned and 
elected must possess definite powers of taxation, legislation, and 
general political deliberation. We will now trace very briefly 
the origin, growth, and combination of these. 

§ 2. The Early National Assembly 

The commune concilium had existed from the earliest times, 
first, as the witenagemot, and afterwards as the court of the king's 
vassals, or, in a manner, as combining the characters of both. It 
had in neither stage been representative, in the modern meaning 
of the word. The witenagemot acted for the nation, but was 
not delegated or elected by it; the great council of the Norman 
kings included in theory all tenants-in-chief of the crown, but had 
no special provision for these to represent their under-tenants, 
or for the securing of the rights of any not personally present. 
The witenagemot possessed and exercised all the powers of a 
free council; the Norman court or parliament claiming the char- 
acter of a witenagemot, if it possessed these rights in theory, 
did not exercise them. At no period, however, of our early his- 
tory was the assembling of the national council dispensed with. 

§ 3. The Principle of Representation 

The representation of all classes of the people is necessary for 
the complete organization of a national council, and that com- 
plete organization is legally constituted by summons to parlia- 
ment. In this three principles are involved: the idea of repre- 
sentation, the idea of exhaustive representation, and the definite 
summons. 

The idea of representation was familiar to the English in the 
minor courts, the hundred-moot and the shire-moot. The reeve 
and four men represented the township in these assemblies; the 
twelve assessors of the sheriff represented the judicial opinion, 
sometimes the collective legal knowledge of the shire. At a later 
period the inquest by sworn recognitors, in civil suits, in the pre- 
sentment of criminals, and in the assessment of real and personal 
property, represented the country, that is, the shire or hundred or 
borough, for whose business they were sworn to answer. 



126 English Historians 



§ 4. Classes of Persons Represented 

The political constituents of the nation (exclusive of the king) 
— the three estates of the realm — are the clergy, the baronage, and 
the commons. A perfect national council must include all these: 
the baronage by personal attendance, the clergy and people by 
representation. The bishops, although their right to appear per- 
sonally in the commune concilium is older than the introduction 
of the feudal principle on which the theory of baronage is based, 
have, by the definition of lawyers, been made to sink their charac- 
ter of witan in that of barons, amongst whom they may for our 
present purpose be included. The representation of the estates 
then implies the union in parliament of (1) the baronage, lay and 
clerical; (2) the lower clergy; and (3) the commons. 

(1) The baronage, in its verbal meaning, includes all bar ones, 
that is, all homagers holding directly of the crown, but by succes- 
sive changes, the progress of which is far from easy to fix chrono- 
logically, it has been limited, first, to all who possess a united 
corpus, or collection of knights' fees held under one title; sec- 
ondly, to those who, possessing such a barony, are summoned by 
special writ ; thirdly, to those who, whether entitled by such tenure 
or not, have received a special summons; and finally, to those 
who have become by creation or prescription entitled hereditarily 
to receive such a summons. The variations of dignity among the 
persons so summoned, represented by the names duke, marquis, 
earl, and viscount are of no constitutional significance. The 
baronial title of the bishops and mitred abbots originated in the 
second and third of the principles thus stated. 

(2) The inferior clergy had immemorialiy their diocesan assem- 
blies and their share in the provincial councils of the Church — 
a share which would be as difficult to define as is that of the plebs 
or populus in the commune concilium regni, but which does 
not much affect constitutional history until the period of Magna 
Carta. At the beginning of the thirteenth century the doctrine 
was gaining ground that the taxpayer should have a voice in the 
bestowal of the tax ; the legal position of the beneficed clergy had 
been long definitely settled; and the changes in the character 
of taxation took from them the immunities which they had earlier 
possessed and still persistently claimed. 

The aids which John condescended to ask of the inferior clergy 
were not granted by assemblies, but collected by separate nego- 



The Origin of Parliament 127 

tiation through the archdeacons, in the same way that the sheriff or 
the itinerant judges negotiated the aids of the towns and counties. 
In a council held by John in 1207 the regular clergy were repre- 
sented by abbots; in another, in 12 13, the cathedral clergy were 
represented by the deans; the rest of the clergy not at all. In 
both of these cases there are analogies with the dealings of the 
lay estates that might be traced at length. Passing over the 
anomalous councils of the next forty years, we find in 1254 a writ 
directing the archbishops and bishops to assemble all the clergy 
for the purpose of granting an aid; in 1255 the proctors of the 
clergy appeared in parliament at Westminster. 

In 1283 Edward I summoned them by their proctors to great 
councils at Northampton and York; in 1294 they were summoned 
by their proctors to the parliament at Westminster; and in 1295 
by the clause prcemunientes in the writ summoning the bishops 
to parliament, the clergy were summoned to appear there, the 
deans and priors of the cathedrals and the archdeacons in person, 
the chapters by one proctor, and the clergy of each diocese by two, 
having full and sufficient power from the chapters and the clergy. 
This clause has been inserted, with a few exceptions, ever since, 
the constant usage dating, as stated by Hody, from the 28th of 
Edward III ; but it has not been acted upon since the fourteenth 
century. We may trace in this the defining hand of Edward I, 
who doubtless intended by this means to introduce a complete and 
symmetrical system of representation into the lower department 
of his parliament. It was defeated by the clergy themselves, 
who preferred to vote their aids in convocation, their own special 
assembly or provincial council which, also, during the reign of 
Edward I, was a few years earlier reconstituted on the represen- 
tative basis, in two divisions, one meeting at London and the 
other at York. The convocations, which were summoned by 
the archbishops and were divided according to the provinces, the 
measure of representation differing in the two, must be carefully 
distinguished from the parliamentary representation of the clergy, 
which was summoned by the king's writ directed to the archbishops 
and bishops, and was intended to be an estate of parliament. 

The commons must be regarded as composed, for political 
purposes, of the population of the shires, the ancient divisions 
on the administration of which the early political system of the 
country was based, and that of the towns or boroughs, which 
had been erected by successive grants of privileges into the status 
of substantive political bodies. 



128 English Historians 



§ 5. Origin 0} County Representation 

Enough has been said already of the origin and growth of repre- 
sentation in the former. It would not appear that there was any 
provision for the incorporation of the representatives of the shires 
in the commune concilium before the reign of John; and when 
the principle is adopted, it is questionable whether they owed their 
privilege to their constitutional position as the most prominent 
portion of an estate of the realm, or to their being the most ready 
machinery for the representation of the minor barons, the lower 
tenants of the crown. The 14th Article of Magna Carta promises 
that these shall be summoned by a general writ and through the 
sheriffs. The only constitutional mode of the sheriff's action was 
in the county court. Hence the minor barons, to be consulted 
at all, must be consulted in the county court. But that court 
was already constituted of all the freeholders, and the machinery 
of representation and election was already familiar to them. It 
would then appear certain that from the time at which the repre- 
sentatives of the shires were first summoned, they were held to 
represent the whole body of freeholders; and although there was 
at a later period a question whether the wages of the knights of 
the shire should be paid by the whole body of freeholders, or only 
by the tenants in knight service, it was never peremptorily deter- 
mined; nor has there ever been a doubt but that the representa- 
tion was that of the whole shire, and the election made, theoreti- 
cally at least, in pleno comitatu, down to the Act of Henry VI, 
which restricted the electoral franchise to the forty shilling free- 
holders. 

The first occasion on which the representatives of the shires 
were summoned to consult with the king and other estates is in 
the 15th of John, 12 13, when the king by writ addressed to the 
sheriffs, directs that four discreet men of each shire shall be 
sent to him, ad loquendum nobiscum de negotiis regni nostri. 
These "four discreet men" must be regarded in connection with 
the custom of electing four knights in the county court to nominate 
the recognitors and grand jury; and the 14th Clause of the Char- 
ter, directing the summons of the minor barons by the sheriffs 
must be interpreted or illustrated by this writ. The next case in 
which it is clear that representatives of the shire were called to 
parliament is that of 1254, when two knights represent each county. 
In 1 261 the barons, and after them Henry III in opposition, sum- 






The Origin of Parliament 129 

moned three knights from each shire. In 1264 Simon de Montfort 
summoned four; to the famous Assembly of 1265 he summoned two. 
In the great Assembly which swore allegiance to Edward I in 1273, 
four knights, and in the second Parliament of 1275 two, represented 
each shire. The mention of the commonalty in the early writs 
and statutes of Edward I seems to show that the practice was 
pursued with some approach to continuity, and certainly in some 
cases, as in the Councils of 1283 and in the Parliament of Shrews- 
bury, it was fully carried out. But the character of these assem- 
blies is a matter of debate, and it cannot certainly be said that the 
knights of the shire were formally summoned to proper par- 
liaments until the year 1290, or that they were regarded as a 
necessary ingredient of parliament until 1294. Their regular and 
continuous summons dates from 1295. 

§ 6. Position of the Boroughs in the English System 

The boroughs of England, like the counties, stood in a double 
relation to the king. In very many cases they were in his demesne, 
and had received their privileges as a gift of purchase from him, 
and in all cases they were a very important element in taxation. 
Either then on the feudal principle as demesne lands, or on the 
political ground as an influential part of the nation, they stood on 
a basis, not indeed so old as that of the county organization, but 
in all other respects scarcely less important. Their history tells 
its own tale : beginning as demesne of a king or of a bishop, abbot, 
or secular lord, they had by the time of the Conquest obtained 
recognition, as individualities apart from the body of the counties 
to which locally they belonged. They were, indeed, generally 
subject to the jurisdiction of the king as his demesne, and not 
included in the corpus comitatus. But the towns so situated at 
the time of the Domesday survey were few, and even for a century 
after they increased in number and importance slowly. Their 
internal condition was but that of any manor in the country; the 
reeve and his companions, the leet jury as it was afterwards called, 
being the magistracy, and the constitution being further strength- 
ened only by the voluntary association of the local guild, whose 
members would naturally furnish the counsellors of the leet. 
The towns so administered were liable to be called on for talliage 
at the will of the lord, and the townsmen were in every respect, 
except wealth and closeness of organization, in the same condi- 
tion as the villeins of an ordinary demesne. 

K 



130 English Historians 

The next step taken in the direction of emancipation was the 
purchase, by the tenants, of the firma burgi, that is, the ferm of 
the dues payable to the lord or the king, within the borough; 
instead of being collected severally by the reeve or the sheriff, 
these were compounded for by a fixed sum, which was paid by 
the burghers and reapportioned amongst themselves. The grant 
of the ferm was accompanied by or implied an act of emancipa- 
tion from villein services; and the recipients of the grant were 
the burghers, as members of the leet or of the guild, or in both 
capacities. The burgage rent was apportioned among the houses 
or tenements of the burghers, who thus became tenants in bur- 
gage and on equality with tenants in free and common socage. 
The possessors of these burgages were, until a further organiza- 
tion was provided, the political constituents of the borough. 

The privileges of the boroughs had not got much beyond this 
at the death of Henry I; the burghers of Beverly, who were char- 
tered during his reign by their lord the Archbishop of York with 
the same privileges as those enjoyed by the citizens of York, are 
empowered by their charter to have their hans-hus, and there to 
make their by-laws, and to enjoy certain immunities from tolls 
within the shire. It is impossible to argue from the privileges of 
the city of London to those of the provincial towns; and in the 
scarcity and uncertainty of the early charters there are many 
serious hindrances to any generalization. Amongst the rights 
claimed by London at this date are those of. electing its own 
sheriff, of exemption from external judicature, freedom from several 
specified imposts, and protection for corporate estates. London, 
however, can never have been regarded as a town in demesne; 
and its privileges, vested in the powerful burghers of the free 
city, served as a model for those which were gradually emancipated. 

Under Henry II we trace an increase in the privileges recog- 
nized or granted by charter , the king confirms the liberties enjoyed 
during the reigns of Edward, William, and Henry I; by special 
privilege the villein who has stayed a year and a day in a chartered 
town unclaimed is freed in perpetuity, or the towns are exempted 
from the jurisdiction of the sheriff or king's officer. It is only by 
fine that they obtain now and then the right to elect their own 
officers. This and other rights scarcely less important are occa- 
sionally granted in the charters of Richard, and commonly in 
those of John, which seem to recognize in the borough a modified 
corporate character but little short of the later idea of incorpora- 
tion. The charter of John to Dunwich is especially full, be- 



The Origin of Parliament 131 

stowing the character of a free borough, enumerating the rights, 
such as sac and soc, in which the burghers enter into the posses- 
sion of the status before belonging to the lord of the franchise; 
the ferm of their town; immunity from all jurisdiction except 
that of the king's justices ; the right to appear before the justices, 
if summoned, by representation of twelve lawful men, and of 
being assessed in case of an amercement by a mixed jury, half 
named out of their own body. The privileges of the towns ad- 
vanced very little farther than this during the thirteenth century; 
but at the beginning of it the principle of representation and elec- 
tion was thus applied to them. 

§ 7. Origin of Borough Representation in Parliament 

No idea of summoning the towns to appear before the king by 
their representatives can be traced higher than the reign of John. 
Before and after this the richer tenants in burgage may have 
occasionally attended the Royal Councils with the other freeholders. 
They would, however, have no representative character whatever; 
nor is there any trace of their magistrates, to whom such a charac- 
ter would belong, being summoned to Parliament, as they were 
to the States General in France by Philip the Fair. The first 
notice of a united representation occurs in 12 13, when John sum- 
moned the representatives of the demesne lands of the crown to 
estimate the compensation to be paid to the plundered bishops. 
By a writ to the sheriffs, they are directed to send to S. Albans 
four men and the reeve from every township in demesne. In this 
may be distinctly traced a connection with the county court rep- 
resentation of earlier and later times. The assembly so con- 
stituted met, and is dignified by Matthew Paris with the title of 
a council, the archbishop, bishops, and magnates being present 
at it. It is indeed the assembly to which, through the justiciar, 
John proposed the restoration of the laws of Henry I. 

From this date, however, to the Parliament of Simon de Mont- 
fort, we find no further traces ; nor can this case be taken as more 
than pointing the way to the later system. The taxation was still 
a matter of arrangement with the officers of the Exchequer, and 
for no other purpose were the towns likely to be consulted. The 
summons of Simon de Montfort was directed to the citizens and 
burghers of the several cities and boroughs, each of which was to 
send two representatives. After the year 1265 there is again a 
long blank ; for although in several places the burghers are spoken 



132 English Historians 

of as joining in grants of money at the king's request, it cannot 
be shown that their representatives were convoked for the pur- 
pose before the year 1295. The National Councils of 1273 and 
1283, and the Parliament of Shrewsbury, contained representatives 
of the towns, but they are not allowed by constitutional lawyers 
the full name of Parliaments ; nor is it certain whether the repre- 
sentatives attended as representing an estate or a part of one, or 
merely for the purpose of informing the king and magnates. In 
1294 the towns were asked for their contributions by distinct com- 
missions; in 1295 they were summoned regularly to Parliament; 
and although the series of writs is not so complete in the case of 
the towns as in that of the counties, their right was then recognized, 
their presence was seen to be indispensable, and the representation 
has been continuous, or nearly continuous, ever since. 

The great difference between the representation of the counties 
and that of the boroughs is this, that it was in the power of the 
crown or its advisers to increase or diminish the number of bor- 
oughs represented — a power based on the doctrine that their 
privilege was the gift of the crown, and their status historically that 
of royal demesne. But their association with the knights of the 
shire, whose numbers could not be altered, and whose possession 
of their right sprang from the more ancient part of the constitu- 
tion, prevented the third estate from falling into the condition 
into which the corresponding body fell in Spain, where the custom 
of summoning towns was adopted earlier; and in France, where 
it was possibly imitated by Philip the Fair from the practice of 
Edward I. 

§ 8. Methods of Summoning Parliament 

The status of the Parliament was constituted by the writs of 
summons, addressed to the barons individually, and to the sheriffs 
for the representation of the third estate. In the latter case both 
towns and counties chose their representatives in the shire-moot. 
Where the particular form of writ was not observed — and both 
for military levies of the vassals and for great councils a distinct 
form was in use — the Assembly, although it might contain every 
element of a Parliament, was not regarded as one. The obscurity 
of our knowledge on this point, caused by the loss of the ancient 
writs, occasions the difficulty that exists about the Assemblies of 
the reign of Henry III and of the early years of Edward I, during 
which many councils were held which contained certainly knights 



The Origin of Parliament 133 

of the shire, and possibly deputies from the towns, but which are 
called Great Councils rather than Parliaments, for this technical 
reason, — either they contained other ingredients besides the regu- 
lar ones of Parliament, or they did not contain all the ingredients 
of Parliament ; or the towns were summoned otherwise than 
through the sheriffs; or the number of representatives varied; or 
the selection of the boroughs was irregular; or the purpose speci- 
fied in the writ was other than parliamentary. 

Such councils were occasionally held in the succeeding reigns, 
and exercised many of the powers of Parliament; but taxes im- 
posed by them, and laws enacted by their authority, were regarded 
as of questionable validity, and sometimes had to be formally 
reenacted. These councils were, however, a part of the process 
by which the institution of Parliaments ripened. The regular 
tribunal of later date, to which the same name of Great Council 
is given, contained the lords spiritual and temporal, the judges of 
the courts, and the other members of the king's ordinary council. 
For judicial purposes it exercised a right which Parliament as such 
had not, and which has descended from it to the House of Lords 
only. It also advised the crown in all matters of government, 
although any attempt at legislation was watched very jealously 
by the commons. 

§ 9. Combination of Election and Representation 

The combination of the principle of election with that of rep- 
resentation has been illustrated by what precedes. The idea of 
election was very ancient in the nation, and had been theoretically 
maintained in both the highest and lowest regions of the polity: 
the kings and prelates were supposed to be elected; the magis- 
trates of the towns, the judicial officers of the counties and forests, 
were really so from the beginning of the thirteenth century, if not 
before. In this, as in every other constitutional point, the free- 
dom claimed and often secured by the clergy served to maintain 
the recollection or idea of a right. In the reign of Edward I the 
lawyers represented it as an ancient Teutonic right that the 
ealdorman, the heretoga, and the sheriff were elected officers. 
The election of sheriff was claimed for the counties during the par- 
liamentary struggle which produced the Provisions of Oxford, and 
was secured to the freeholders by the articuli super cartas in 
1300; but the privilege was withdrawn in the next reign. The 
two principles of election and representation have never been 



134 English Historians 

divided in England since the reign of Edward I, although the 
variety of franchises and disputes on the right of voting for mem- 
bers of Parliament are for many centuries bewildering in the ex- 
treme. The towns, however close the elective franchise, have 
never been, as in France, represented by their magistrates as such. 

§ 10. Powers oj Parliament 

Of the four normal powers of a National Assembly, the judicial 
has never been exercised by the Parliament as a parliament. The 
House of Commons is not, either by itself or in conjunction with 
the House of Lords, a court of justice ; the House of Lords has in- 
herited its jurisdiction from the Great Council. Another power, 
the political, or right of general deliberation on all national matters, 
is too vague in its extent to be capable of being chronologically 
defined; nor was it really vindicated by the Parliament until a 
much later period than that on which we are now employed. 
The two most important remain, the legislative and the taxative, 
the tracing of whose history must complete our present survey. 

§ ii. Development oj the Legislative Power oj Parliament 

The ancient theory that the laws were made by the king and 
Witan coordinately, if it be an ancient theory, has within historic 
times been modified by the doctrine that the king enacted the 
laws with the counsel and consent of the Witan. This is the most 
ancient form existing in enactments, and is common to the early 
laws of all the Teutonic races; it has, of course, always been still 
more modified in usage by the varying power of the king and his 
counsellors, and by the share that each was strong enough to vindi- 
cate in the process. Until the reign of John the varieties of prac- 
tice may be traced chiefly in the form taken by the law on its 
enactment. The ancient laws are either drawn up as codes, like 
Alfred's, or as amendments of customs: often we have only the 
bare abstract of them, the substance that was orally transmitted 
from one generation of Witan to another ; where we have them in 
integrity the counsel and consent of the Witan are specified. The 
laws of the Norman kings are put in the form of charters ; the king 
in his sovereign capacity grants and confirms liberties and free 
customs to his people, but with the counsel and consent of his 
barons and faithful. 

Henry II issued most of his enactments as edicts or assizes, 



The Origin of Parliament 135 

with a full rehearsal of the counsel and consent of his archbishops, 
bishops, abbots, priors, earls, barons, knights, and freeholders. 
The compact of John with the barons has the form of a charter; 
but, as already stated, is really a treaty based on articles proposed 
to him, and containing additional articles to secure execution. 
From the time of John the forms vary, and the reign of Henry III 
contains statutes of every shape, — the charter, the assize, the 
articles proposed and accepted, and the special form of provisions, 
which are analogous to the canons of ecclesiastical councils. 
From the reign of Edward I the forms are those of statutes and 
ordinances, differing in some ascertained respects, the former 
formally accepted in the Parliaments as laws of perpetual obliga- 
tion, and enrolled; the latter proceeding from the king and his 
council rather than from the king and Parliament, being more 
temporary in character, and not enrolled among the statutes. All 
alike express the counsel and consent with which the king fortifies 
his own enacting power ; but several of the early statutes of Edward 
are worded as if that enacting power resided in the king and his 
ordinary council; and it is not clear whether this assumption is 
based on the doctrine of the scientific jurists who were addicted 
to the civil law, or on imitation of the practice of the French kings 
just then made illustrious by the Establishments of St. Lewis. 

The actual force of the expression "counsel and consent," 
which is preserved during so long a period and under such various 
developments of the royal power, can only be estimated approxi- 
mately, according to the occasion or the needs or the character 
of the sovereign who acknowledges it. It stands, for at least a 
century after the Conquest, as the record of a right rather than the 
expression of a fact. Under Henry II and his descendants, by 
whom a large share of power was actually vested in the ministers 
and judges, the facility of consultation was much increased, but 
it remains an obscure point, whether consent could be withheld 
as well as bestowed, and whether it was not generally taken for 
granted. 

From the reign of Henry III it was probably a reality, and from 
that of Edward I downwards the form has a typical force, and 
the variations later introduced into it have a greal deal of meaning. 
After the permanent incorporation of the commons, from 13 18 
downwards, the form is : by the assent of the prelates,. earls, barons, 
and the commonalty of the realm. From the first year of Edward 
III the share of the commons is frequently expressed as petition, 
by the assent of the prelates, earls, and barons, and at the request 



136 English Historians 

of the commons; under Richard II the assent is occasionally 
expressed as simply that of the lords and commons. Henry IV 
enacts with the advice and assent of the lords at the request of 
the commons. In the 23rd of Henry VI the addition by author- 
ity of Parliament first occurs; and from the 1st of Henry VII the 
mention of petition is dropped, and the regular form becomes 
the advice and assent, or consent, of the lords spiritual and tem- 
poral and commons in Parliament assembled, and by authority 
of the same. These forms, certainly, are not uniformly observed ; 
but the origin of the changes may be exactly traced and will be 
found to synchronize with the later changes in the balance of 
power between the several estates and the sovereign. 

The further question, Were the estates on an equality in respect 
of legislation ? may be thus briefly answered. The claim of the 
clergy and commons to a voice was not admitted so early in legis- 
lation as in the case of taxation : once admitted, the power of the 
commons very quickly eliminated all direct interference on the 
part of the clergy. Down to the end of the reign of Edward I 
it can hardly be said that the right of counsel was extended to the 
commons at all ; it is in the next reign that their power of initiation 
by way of petition is first recognized. As late as the 18th of 
Edward I, the statute quia emptores was passed by the king and 
barons, before the day for which the commons was summoned. 
As to the clergy, there is no doubt either that they exercised the 
right of petition or that the king occasionally made a statute at 
their request, with the consent of the lords, and without reference 
to the commons ; but acts so sanctioned were not regarded by the 
lawyers as of full authority, and are relegated, perhaps rightly, 
to the class of ordinances. Possibly the royal theory was that the 
right of petition belonged to both clergy and commons, whilst 
the counsel and consent of the lords only was indispensable. It 
was not until the 15th of Edward II that the voice of Parliament, 
when revoking the acts of the ordainers, distinctly enunciated the 
principle that all matters to be established for the estate of the king 
and people " shall be treated, accorded, and established in Par- 
liaments by the king and by the assent of the prelates, earls, barons, 
and commonalty of the realm, according as it hath been hitherto 
accustomed." 

The growth of the right of the commons may be traced in the 
forms of the writs : in those of John, the knights of the shire are 
summoned simply ad loquendum; those of Simon de Montfort 
describe them as tractaturi et consilium impensari; ad tractandum 



The Origin of Parliament 137 

as well as ad consulendum et consentiendum being the form of sum- 
mons usual in the case of a Great Council. Edward I, in 1283, sum- 
mons the representatives of the towns ad audiendum et faciendum; 
in 1294 he summons the knights of the shire ad considendum et 
consentiendum, pro se et communitate ilia, Us quce comites, barones, 
et proceres prcedicti ordinaverint, with which agrees the fact that, 
in 1290, they were not assembled until the legislative part of the 
work of the Parliament had been transacted. From the year 1295, 
however, the form is ad faciendum; under Edward II it be- 
comes ad consentiendum et faciendum, to assent and enact. 
From this time, then, the commons were admitted to a share of 
the character of the sapientes, which in this respect the bishops 
and barons had engrossed since the Conquest, and the king was 
enabled to state with truth, as Edward I did to the pope, that the 
custom of England was, that in business affecting the state of the 
kingdom the counsel of all whom the matter touched should be 
required. The corresponding variations in the prcemunientes 
clause summoning the clergy are: in 1295, ad tractandum, ordi- 
nandum, et faciendum; in 1299, ad faciendum et consentiendum; 
from 138 1, only ad consentiendum, a function adequately dis- 
charged by absence. 

§ 12. Connection between Taxation and Representation 

The share of the commons in taxation takes precedence of their 
share in legislation. The power of voting money was more neces- 
sary than that of giving counsel. Of this power, as it existed up 
to the date of Magna Carta, enough has been said. The witen- 
agemot and its successor, the royal council of barons, could impose 
the old national taxes ; the ordinary feudal exactions were matters 
of common law and custom, and the amount of them was limited 
by usage. But the extraordinary aids which Henry II and his 
sons substituted for the Danegeld, and the taxes on the demesne 
lands of the crown, were arbitrary in amount and incidence; the 
former clearly requiring, and the latter, on all moral grounds, not 
less demanding, an act of consent on the part of the payers. This 
right was early recognized; even John, as we have seen, asked his 
barons sometimes for grants, and treated with the demesne lands 
and towns through the Exchequer, with the clergy through the 
bishops and archdeacons. 

Magna Carta enunciates the principle that the payers shall be 
called to the common council to vote the aids which had been 



138 English Historians 

previously negotiated separately; but the clause was never confirmed 
by Henry III, nor was it applicable to the talliage of demesne. 
It is as the towns begin to increase, and at the same time taxation 
ceases to be based solely on land and begins to affect personal as 
well as real property, that the difficulties of the king and the hard- 
ships of the estates liable to talliage become important. The 
steps by which the king was compelled to give up the right of taking 
money without a parliamentary grant, are the same as those which 
led to the confirmation of the charters by Edward I. It was virtu- 
ally surrendered in the clause then conceded in addition to the 
charter, which is commonly known under the form of the articles, 
de tallagio non concedendo. And this completed the taxative 
powers of Parliament. The further steps of development, the 
determination of the different proportions in which the various 
branches of the three estates voted their supplies, and the final 
engrossing of the taxing power by the House of fommons, the 
struggles by which the grants were made to depend on the redress 
of grievances, and the determination of the disposal of supplies 
assumed by the Parliament, belong to later history. 

We have thus brought our sketch of constitutional history to 
the point of time at which the nation may be regarded as reaching 
its full stature. It has not yet learned its strength, nor accustomed 
itself to economize its power. To trace the process by which it 
learned the full strength of its organism, — by which it learned 
to use its powers and forces with discrimination and effect; to 
act easily, effectually, and economically; or, to use another meta- 
phor, to trace the gradual wear of the various parts of the machin- 
ery, until all roughness was smoothed, and all that was superfluous, 
entangling, and confusing was got rid of, and the balance of forces 
adjusted, and action made manageable and intelligible, and the 
power of adaptation to change of circumstances fully realized, — 
is the story of later politics, of a process that is still going on, and 
must go on as the age advances, and men are educated into wider 
views of government, national unity, and political responsibility. 
We stop, however, with Edward I, because the machinery is now 
completed, the people are at full growth. The system is raw and 
untrained and awkward, but it is complete. The attaining of this 
point is to be attributed to the defining genius, the political wisdom, 
and the honesty of Edward I, building on the immemorial foun- 
dation of national custom; fitting together all that Henry I had 
planned, Henry II had organized, and the heroes of the thirteenth 
century had inspired with fresh life and energy. 



The Origin of Parliament 130 



Bibliographical Note 

Baldwin, Early Records of the King's Council, in the American Historical 
Review, October, 1905. Gneist, History of the English Constitution, chaps, 
xxiv-xxv. Hearn, The Government of England, chaps, xvi-xviii. Pollock and 
Maitland, History of English Law, Vol. I, Bk. II, chap, iii, for the organiza- 
tion of the county and borough. Pike, Constitutional History of the House 
of Lords. Stubbs, Lectures on Early English History, chaps, xvii and xviii. 
For the illustrative documents consult the Pennsylvania Translations and 
Reprints, Vol. I, no. 6. 



CHAPTER VII 

GROWTH OF PARLIAMENTARY POWERS 

It was a long time after the Model Parliament of Edward I 
before Parliament took on a definite form of two houses, each with 
its settled customs and rules of procedure. A general account of 
this further development will be found in almost any good text- 
book, especially in Mr. Medley's excellent manual, English Con- 
stitutional History, chapter iv. While tracing the evolution of 
the forms of Parliament, the student must also observe an equally 
important process, that is, the development of the powers of the 
respective houses, not in an abstract fashion, but always in relation 
to concrete contemporary events. Originating as a feudal and 
taxing body, Parliament, in the struggle with the kings, attempted 
to control not only the amount and form of taxes, but also their 
expenditure. Furthermore, Parliament contended for the right to 
make new laws and restrain the king from arbitrary action in this 
sphere also. The methods by which these various claims to power 
were made effective are elaborately discussed by Dr. Stubbs in 
the seventeenth chapter of his Constitutional History, from which 
only a few passages can be given here. 

§ i . Parliamentary Control of Royal Ministers 1 

The idea of controlling expenditure and securing the redress 
of all administrative abuses by maintaining a hold upon the king's 
ministers, and even upon the king himself, appears in our history, 
as soon as the nation begins to assert its constitutional rights, in 
the executory clauses of the Great Charter. Three methods of 
attaining the end proposed recommended themselves at different 

1 Stubbs, Constitutional History of England, Vol. II, chap. xvii. By per- 
mission of the Delegates of the Clarendon Press, Oxford. 

140 



Growth of Parliamentary Powers 141 

times: these are analogous, in the case of the ministers, to the 
different methods by which, under various systems, the nation has 
attempted to restrain the exercise of royal power; the rule of 
election, the tie of the coronation oath, and the threats of deposi- 
tion ; and they are liable to the same abuses. 

The scheme of limiting the irresponsible power of the king by 
the election of the great officers of state in Parliament has already 
been referred to as one of the results of the long minority of Henry 
III. It was in close analogy with the practice of election to bishop- 
rics and abbacies, and to the theory of royal election itself. When, 
in 1244 and several succeeding years, the barons claimed the right 
of choosing the justiciar, chancellor, and treasurer, they probably 
intended that the most capable man should be chosen, and that 
his appointment should be, if not for life, at least revocable only 
by the consent of the nation in Parliament. The king saw more 
clearly perhaps than the barons that his power thus limited would 
be a burden rather than a dignity, and that no king worthy of the 
name could consent to be deprived of all freedom of action. Henry 
III pertinaciously resisted the proposal, and it was never even 
made to Edward I, although in one instance he was requested to 
dismiss an unpopular treasurer. Revived under Edward II, in 
the thirteenth and following articles of the Ordinances, and exer- 
cised by the ordainers when they were in power, it was defeated 
or dropped under Edward III; in 1241 the commons demanded 
that a fresh nomination of ministers should be made in every Par- 
liament; Edward agreed, but repudiated the concession. 

It was naturally enough again brought forward in the minority 
of Richard II. The commons petitioned in his first Parliament 
that the chancellor, treasurer, chief justices and chief baron, the 
steward and treasurer of the household, the chamberlain, privy 
seal, and wardens of the forests on each side of the Trent, might 
be appointed in Parliament; and the petition was granted and 
embodied in an ordinance for the period of the king's minority. 
In 1380 the commons again urged that the five principal ministers, 
the chancellor, treasurer, privy seal, chamberlain, and steward of 
the household should be elected in Parliament, and that the five 
chosen in the present Parliament might not be removed before the 
next session ; the king replied by reference to the ordinance made in 
1377. In 138 1 they prayed that the king would appoint as chan- 
cellor the most efficient person he could find, whether spiritual 
or temporal; in 1383 that he would employ sage, honest, and dis- 
creet counsellors; and in 1385 he had to decline summarily to 



142 English Historians 

name the officers whom he intended to employ "for the comfort 
of the commons." 

But it may be questioned whether under the most favorable 
circumstances the right claimed was really exercised ; the commons 
seem generally to have been satisfied when the king announced 
his nomination in Parliament, and to have approved it without 
question. The appointments made by Edward II in opposition 
to the ordainers, when he removed their nominees and appointed 
his own, were acts of declared hostility, and equivalent to a dec- 
laration of independence. The ultimate failure of a pretension, 
maintained on every opportunity for a century and a half, would 
seem to prove that, however in theory it may have been compatible 
with the idea of a limited monarchy, it was found practically im- 
possible to maintain it ; the personal influence of the king would 
overbear the authority of any ordinary minister, and the minister 
who could overawe the king would be too dangerous for the peace 
of the realm. The privy council records of Richard II show 
that even with the ministers of his own selection the king did not 
always get his own way. 

§ 2. Control through the Oath of Office 

A second expedient was tried in the oath of office, an attempt 
to bind the conscience of the minister which belongs especially 
to the age of clerical officials. The forms of oath prescribed by 
the Provisions of Oxford illustrate this method, but there is no 
reason to suppose that it was then first adopted. The oath of the 
sheriffs and of the King's counsellors is probably much more 
ancient, and the king's own oath much older still. The system 
is open to the obvious objection which lies against all such obliga- 
tions, that they are not requisite to bind a good minister or strong 
enough to bind a bad one ; but they had a certain directive force, 
and in ages in which the reception of money-gifts, whether as 
bribes or thank-offerings, was common and little opposed to the 
moral sense of the time, it was an advantage that the public ser- 
vants should know that they could not without breach of faith 
use their official position for the purpose of avarice or self- 
aggrandizement. 

But when we find the best of our kings believing themselves 
relieved from the obligation of an oath by absolution, we can 
scarcely think that such a bond was likely to secure good faith in a 
minister trained in ministerial habits, ill-paid for his services, and 



Growth of Parliamentary Powers 143 

anxious to make his position a stepping-stone to higher and safer 
preferment. It is seldom that the oath of the minister appears 
as an effective pledge; the lay ministers of Edward III, in 1341, 
allowed their master to make use of their sworn obligation to in- 
validate the legislation of Parliament and to enable him to excuse 
his own repudiation of his word. Generally the oath only appears 
as an item among the charges against a fallen or falling minister, 
against whom perjury seems a convenient allegation. 

§ 3. Punishment and Admonition of Ministers; Origin in Royal 

Practice 

The third method was rather an expedient for punishment and 
warning than a scheme for enforcing ministerial good behavior ; it 
was the calling of the public servant to account for his conduct 
whilst in office. In this point the Parliament reaped the benefit 
of the experience of the kings, and did it easily, for, as the whole 
of the administrative system of the government sprang out of the 
economic action of the Norman court, a strict routine of account 
and acquittance had been immemorially maintained. The annual 
audits of the Exchequer had produced the utmost minuteness in 
public accounts, such as have been quoted as illustrating the finan- 
cial condition of England under Edward I. Minute bookkeeping, 
however, does not secure official honesty, as the Norman kings were 
w r ell aware; the sale of the great offices of state, common under 
Henry I and tolerated even under Henry II, shows that the kings 
were determined that their ministers should have a consider- 
able stake in their own good conduct ; a chancellor who had paid 
£10,000 for the seals was not likely to forfeit them for the sake of a 
petty malversation which many rivals would be ready to detect. 

On the other hand the kings possessed, in the custom of mulcting 
a discharged official, — a custom which was not peculiar to the 
Oriental monarchies, — an expedient which could be applied to 
more than one purpose. Henry II had used the accounts of the 
chancery as one of the means by which he revenged himself on 
Becket. Richard I had compelled his father's servants to repur- 
chase their offices, and the greatest of them, Ranulph Glanville, 
he had forced to ransom himself with an enormous fine. The 
minister who had .worn out the king's patience, or had restrained 
his arbitrary will, could be treated in the same way. Hubert de 
Burgh had been a good servant to Henry III, but the king could 
not resist the temptation to plunder him. Edward I again seems 



144 English Historians 

to have considered that the judges whom he displaced in 1290 
were rehabilitated by the payment of a fine — a fact which shows 
that the line was not very sharply drawn between the lawful 
and unlawful profits of office. Edward II revenged himself on 
Walter Langton, Edward III vented his irritation on the Stratfords, 
John of Gaunt attacked William of Wykeham with much the 
same weapons, and in each case the minister assailed neither in- 
curred deep disgrace nor precluded himself from a return to favor. 
Such examples taught the nation the first lessons of the doctrine 
of ministerial responsibility. Great as were the offences of Ed- 
ward II, Stapledon the treasurer and Baldock the chancellor 
were the more immediate and direct objects of national indig- 
nation ; they were scarcely less hated than the Dispensers, and 
shared their fate. The Kentish rioters or revolutionists of 138 1 
avenged their wrongs on the chancellor and treasurer, even whilst 
they administered to the Londoners generally the oath of fealty 
to King Richard and the commons. 

§ 4. Instances of Impeachment 

But it is in the transactions of the Good Parliament that this 
principle first takes its constitutional form ; kings and barons had 
used it as a cloak for their vindictive or aggressive hostility ; the com- 
mons first applied it to the remedy of public evils. The impeach- 
ment of Lord Latimer, Lord Neville, Richard Lyons, Alice Perrers, 
and the rest of the dishonest courtiers of Edward III, is thus a 
most significant historical landmark. The cases of Latimer and 
Neville are the most important, for they, as chamberlain and 
steward, filled two of the chief offices of the household ; but the 
association of the other agents and courtiers in their condemnation 
shows that the commons were already prepared to apply the newly 
found weapon in a still more trenchant way, not merely to secure 
official honesty, but to remedy all public abuses even when and 
where they touched the person of the king, and moreover to secure 
that public servants once found guilty of dishonest conduct should 
not be employed again. As the grand jury of the nation, the 
sworn recognitors of national rights and grievances, they thus 
entered on the most painful but not the least needful of their 
functions. 

The impeachment of Michael de la Pole in 1386 and of Sir 
Simon Burley and his companions in 1388 was the work of the 
commons. It is to be distinguished carefully from the proceedings 



Growth of Parliamentary Powers 145 

of the lords appellant, which were indefensible on moral or political 
grounds, for there the guilt of the accused was not proved, and the 
form of proceeding against them was not sanctioned by either law 
or equity. But the lesson which it conveyed was full of instruction 
and warning. The condemnation of Michael de la Pole especially 
showed that the great officers of state must henceforth regard them- 
selves as responsible to the nation, not to the king only. The 
condemnation of the favorites proved that no devotion to the per- 
son of the king could justify the subject in disobeying the law of 
the land, or even in disregarding the principles of the constitution 
as they were now asserting themselves. The cruelty and vindic- 
tiveness of these prosecutions must be charged against the lords 
appellant who prompted the commons to institute them ; the com- 
mons, however, were taught their own strength even by its misuse. 
And still more terribly was the lesson impressed upon them when 
Richard's hour of vengeance came, and they were employed to 
impeach Archbishop Arundel, ostensibly for his conduct as chan- 
cellor and for his participation in the cruelties of which their prede- 
cessors in the House of Commons had been the willing instru- 
ments, but really that they might in alliance with the king complete 
the reprisals due for the work in which they had shared with the 
appellants. The dangerous facility with which the power of im- 
peachment might be wielded seems to have daunted the advo- 
cates of national right; the commons as an estate of the realm 
joyfully acquiesced in the change of dynasty, but, by subsequently 
protesting that the judgments of Parliament belonged to the king 
and lords only, they attempted to avoid responsibility for the 
judicial proceedings taken against the unhappy Richard. . . . 

§ 5. Acquisition of Control through Financial Restraint 

The command of the national purse was the point on which 
the claims of the nation and the prerogative of the king came most 
frequently into collision both directly and indirectly ; the demand 
that the king should live of his own, was the most summary and 
comprehensive of the watchwords by which the constitutional 
struggle was guided, and the ingenuity of successive kings and 
ministers was taxed to the utmost in contriving evasions of a rule 
which recommended itself to the common sense of the nation. 
But it must not be supposed that either the nation or its leaders, 
when once awakened, looked with less jealousy on the royal 
pretensions to legislate, to resist all reforms of administrative 

L 



146 English Historians 

procedure, to interfere with the ordinary process of law, or to 
determine by the fiat of the king alone the course of national policy. 
On these points, perhaps, they had an easier victory, because 
the special struggles turned generally on the question of money; 
but though easier, it was not the less valuable. There is, indeed, 
this distinction, that whilst some of the kings set a higher value 
than others on these powers and on the prerogatives that were 
connected with them, money was indispensable to all. The ad- 
mission of the right of Parliament to legislate, to inquire into abuses, 
and to share in the guidance of national policy was practically 
purchased by the money granted to Edward I and Edward III, 
although Edward I had a just theory of national unity, and 
Edward III exercised little more political foresight than prompted 
him to seek the acquiescence of the nation in his own schemes. 

It has been well said that although the English people have never 
been slow to shed their blood in defence of liberty, most of the 
limitations by which at different times they have succeeded in 
binding the royal power have been purchased with money, many 
of them by stipulated payments, in the offering and accepting of 
which neither party saw anything to be ashamed of. The con- 
firmation of the charters in 1225 by Henry III contains a straight- 
forward admission of the fact, "for this concession and the gift 
of these liberties and those contained in the charter of the forests, 
the archbishops, bishops, abbots, priors, earls, barons, knights, 
freeholders, and all men of the realm granted us a fifteenth part of 
all their movable goods." The charter of the national liberties 
was in fact drawn up just like the charter of a privileged town. In 
1297 Edward I, in equally plain terms, recognized the price which 
he had taken for the renewal of the charter of his father. In 
1301, at Lincoln, the barons on behalf of the whole community 
told the king that if their demands were granted they would increase 
their gift from a twentieth to a fifteenth; in 13 10 they told Edward 
II that they had by the gift of a twentieth purchased relief from 
prizes and other grievances; in 1339 the king informed the com- 
mons, by way of inducing them to be liberal, that the chancellor 
was empowered to grant some favors to the nation in general, 
as grantz et as petitz de la commune, to which they replied in the 
next session that if their conditions were not fulfilled, they would 
not be bound to grant the aid. The rehearsal, in the statutes of 
1340 and later years, of the conditions on which the money grants 
of those years were bestowed, shows that the idea was familiar. 
It furnished, in fact, a practical solution of difficult questions, 






Growth of Parliamentary Powers 147 

which in theory were insoluble. The king had rights as lord of 
his people, the people had rights as freemen and as estates of the 
realm which the king personified; the definition of the rights of 
each, in theory most difficult, became practically easy when it was 
reduced to a question of bargain and sale. 

§ 6. Grants of Money and Redress of Grievances 

As year by year the royal necessities became greater, more com- 
plete provision was made for the declaration of the national 
demands. The presentation of gravamina was made an invari- 
able preliminary to the discussion of a grant ; the redress of griev- 
ances was the condition of the grant, and the actual remedy, the 
execution of the conditions; the fulfilment of the promises, the 
actual delivery of the purchased right, became the point on which 
the crisis of constitutional progress turned. Except in cases of 
great and just irritation, an aid was never refused. When it was 
made conditional on redress of grievances, the royal promise was 
almost necessarily accepted as conclusive on the one side, the 
money was paid, the promise might or might not be kept. 

Especially where the grievance was caused by maladministra- 
tion rather than by the fault of the law, it was impossible to exact 
the remedy before the price was paid. Even under Henry IV the 
claim made by the commons, that the petitions should be answered 
before the subsidy was granted, was refused as contrary to the 
practice of Parliament. Thus the only security for redress was the 
power of refusing money when it was next asked, a power which 
might again be met by insincere promises or by obstinate per- 
sistence in misgovernment which would ultimately lead to civil 
war. The idea of making supply depend upon the actual redress 
could only be realized under a system of government for which the 
nations of Europe were not yet prepared — under that system of 
limited monarchy secured by ministerial responsibility, towards 
which England at least was feeling her way. 

§ 7. Formal Reception of Petitions by the King 

It was under Edward III that it became a regular form at the 
opening of Parliament for the chancellor to declare the king's 
willingness to hear the petitions of his people ; all who had griev- 
ances were to bring them to the foot of the throne that the king 
with the advice of his council or of the lords might redress them; 



148 English Historians 

but the machinery for receiving and considering such petitions 
as came from private individuals or separate communities was 
perfected, as we have seen, by Edward I. Petitions, however, for 
the redress of national grievances run back to earlier precedents, 
and these became, almost immediately on the completion of the 
parliamentary system in 1295, the most important part of the work 
of the session. The articles of the barons of 121 5, the petition of 
1258, the bill of articles presented at Lincoln in 1301, the petitions 
of 1309 and 13 10, were the precedents for the long list of petitions, 
sometimes offered by the estates together or in pairs, but most 
frequently by the commons alone. 

These petitions fill the greatest part of the Rolls of Parliament; 
they include all personal and political complaints, they form the 
basis of the conditions of money grants, and of nearly all adminis- 
trative and statutory reforms. They are, however, still petitions, 
prayers for something which the king will, on consultation with the 
lords or council, give or withhold, and on which his answer is 
definitive, whether he gives it as the supreme legislator or as the 
supreme administrator, by reference to the courts of law, or by an 
ordinance framed to meet the particular case brought before him, 
or by the making of a new law. 

In the first of these cases, the reference of petitions addressed 
to the king, to the special tribunal to which they should be sub- 
mitted, need not be further discussed at this point. It has, as 
has been pointed out in an earlier chapter, a bearing on the history 
of the judicature, the development of the chancery, and the juris- 
diction of the king in council; but, except when the commons 
take an opportunity of reminding the king of the incompleteness 
of the arrangements for hearing petitions, or when they suggest 
improvements in the proceedings, it does not much concern par- 
liamentary history ; although the commons make it a part of their 
business to see that the private petitions are duly considered, the 
judicial power of the lords is not shared by the commons nor is 
action upon the petition which requires judicial redress ever made 
a condition of a money grant. 

§ 8. Petition, Ordinance, and Legislation 

The other two cases are directly and supremely important. 
Whether the king redresses grievances by ordinance or by statute, 
he is really acting as a legislator. Although in one case he acts 
with the advice of his council and in the other by the counsel and 



Growth of Parliamentary Powers 149 

consent of the estates of the realm, the enacting power is his; no 
advice or consent of Parliament can make a statute without him; 
even if the law is his superior, and he has sworn to maintain the 
law which his people shall have chosen, there is no constitutional 
machinery which compels him to obey the law or observe his oath. 
More particularly, he is the framer of the law which the advice 
or consent of the nation has urged or assisted him to make; he 
turns the petitions of the commons into statutes or satisfies them 
by ordinance ; he interprets the petitions and interprets the statutes 
formed upon them. By his power, too, of making ordinances in 
council he claims the power not only to supply the imperfections 
of the statute law, but to suspend its general operation, to make 
particular exceptions to its application, to abolish it altogether 
where it is contrary to his prerogative right. Many of these 
powers arid claims are so intimately bound up with the accepted 
theory of legislation that they cannot be disentangled without 
great difficulty, and in some points the struggle necessarily ends in 
a compromise. 

Nearly the whole of the legislation of the fourteenth century is 
based upon the petitions of Parliament. Some important develop- 
ments of administrative process grew out of the constructive legis- 
lation of Edward I, and were embodied in acts of Parliament as 
well as in ordinances; but a comparison of the Rolls of Parlia- 
ment with the Statute Book proves that the great bulk of the new 
laws were initiated by the estates and chiefly by the commons. 
Hence the importance of the right of petition and of freedom of 
speech in the declaration of gravamina, asserted by the invaluable 
precedents of 1301 and 1309. As the petitions of the commons 
were urged in connection with the discussion of money grants, it 
was very difficult to refuse them peremptorily without losing the 
chance of a grant. They were, also, it may be fairly allowed, stated 
almost invariably in reasonable and respectful language. Thus, 
although when it was necessary to refuse them, the refusal is 
frequently stated very distinctly, in most cases it was advisable 
either to agree or to pretend to agree, or if not to declare 
that the matter in question should be duly considered; the form 
le roi s'avisera did not certainly in its original use involve a 
downright rejection. 

§ 9. Royal Evasion of Petitions 

But the king's consent to the prayer of a petition did not turn 
it into a statute ; it might be forgotten in the hurry of business, or 



150 English Historians 

in the interval between two Parliaments; and as the House of 
Commons seldom consisted of the same members for two years 
together, it might thus drop out of sight altogether, or it might 
purposely be left incomplete. If it were turned into a statute, the 
statute might contain provisions which were not contained in the 
petition and which robbed the concession of its true value; or, 
if it were honestly drawn up, it might contain no provisions for 
execution, and so remain a dead letter. And when formally drawn, 
sealed, and enrolled, it was liable to be suspended either generally 
or in particular cases by the will of the king; possibly, as was the 
case in 1341, to be revoked altogether. The constant complaints, 
recorded in the petitions on the Rolls of Parliament, show that 
resort was had to each of these means of evading the fulfilment of 
the royal promises even when the grants of money were made con- 
ditional upon their performance; and the examination of these 
evasions is not the least valuable of the many lessons which the 
history of the prerogative affords. 

The first point to be won was the right to insist on clear and 
formal answers to the petitions, and this was itself a common sub- 
ject of petition; in several of the Parliaments of Edward III, 
for instance in 1332, the proceedings of the session were so much 
hurried that there was no time to discuss the petitions, and the 
king was requested to summon another Parliament. In 1373 the 
king urged that the question of supplies should be settled before 
the petitions were entertained; the commons met the demand 
with a prayer that they should be heard at once. Occasionally 
the delay was so suspicious that it had to be directly met with the 
proposition such as was made in 1383, that the Parliament should 
not break up until the business of the petitions had been completed. 
If the answer thus extorted were not satisfactory, means must be 
taken to make it so; in 1341, when the king had answered the 
petitions, the lords and commons were advised that "the said 
answers were not so full and sufficient as the occasion required," 
and the clergy were likewise informed that they were not "so pleas- 
ant as reason demanded." The several estates accordingly asked 
to have the answers in writing; they were then discussed and 
modified. If the answers were satisfactory, it was necessary next 
to make them secure ; to this end were addressed the petitions that 
the answers should be reduced into form and sealed before the 
Parliament separated; thus in 1344 and 1362 the commons prayed 
that the petitions might be examined and redress ordered before 
the end of the Parliament pur salvetee du poeple; in 1352 that 



Growth of Parliamentary Powers 151 

all the reasonable petitions of their estate might be granted, con- 
firmed, and sealed before the departure of the Parliament; and in 
1379 the same request was made with an additional prayer that a 
statute might be made to the same effect. The king granted the 
first point, but said nothing about the statute, and no such statute 
was enacted. As a rule, however, this was the practice : either the 
petitions were answered at once, or the private and less important 
were left to the council, or once or twice perhaps, as in 1388, were 
deferred to be settled by a committee which remained at work 
after the Parliament broke up. 

§ 10. Changes in Transmuting Petitions into Statutes 

A more damaging charge than that of delaying the answers to 
petitions is involved in the complaint that the purport of the 
answers was changed during the process of transmutation into 
statute. To avoid this the commons petitioned from time to time 
that the statutes or ordinances of reform should be read before the 
house previously to being engrossed or sealed. Thus in 1341 it 
was made one of the conditions of a grant, that the petition showed 
by the great men and the commons should be affirmed according 
as they were granted by the king, by statute, charter, or patent; 
in 1344 the commons prayed that the petitions might be reviewed 
and examined by the magnates and other persons assigned; in 
1347 the commons prayed that all the petitions presented by 
their body for the common profit and amendment of mischiefs 
might be answered and indorsed in Parliament before the com- 
mons, that they might know the indorsements and have remedy 
thereon according to the ordinance of Parliament; in 1348 they 
asked that the petitions to be introduced in the present session 
might be heard by a committee of prelates, lords, and judges, in 
the presence of four or six members of the commons, so that they 
might be reasonably answered in the present Parliament, and, 
when they were answered in full, the answers might remain in 
force without being changed. In 1377 it was necessary to main- 
tain that the petitions themselves should be read before the lords 
and commons, that they niight be debated amicably and in good 
faith and reason, and so determined ; and in the same Parliament 
the commons demanded that, as the petitions to which Edward III 
in the last Parliament but one had replied le roi.le veut ought to 
be made into statutes, the ordinances framed on these petitions 
should be read and rehearsed before them with a view to such an 



152 English Historians 

enactment; in 13 81 they demanded that the ordinance for the 
royal household, made in consequence of the petition, might be 
laid before them that they might know the persons and manner 
of the said ordinance before it was engrossed and confirmed; 
in 1385, as in 1341, it was made one of the conditions of a grant, 
that the points contained in certain special bills should be indorsed 
in the same manner as they had been granted by the king. Many 
expedients were adopted to insure this; in 1327 it was proposed 
that the points conceded by the king should be put in writing, 
sealed, and delivered to the knights of the shire to be published 
in their counties; in 1339 the commons prayed the king to show 
them what security he would give them for the performance of their 
demands; in 1340 a joint committee of the lords and commons was 
named to embody in a statute the points of petition which were 
to be made perpetual, those which were of temporary importance 
being published as ordinances in letters patent; in 1341 the prayer 
was made that the petitions of the magnates and of the commons 
be affirmed accordingly as they had been granted by the king, the 
perpetual points in statutes, the temporary ones in letters patent 
or charters; and in 1344 the conditions of the money grant were 
embodied in letters patent pur reconforter le poeple, and so 
enrolled on the statute roll. This form of record recommended 
itself to the clergy also; they demanded that their grant and the 
conditions on which it was made should be recorded in a charter. 
We have not, it is true, any clear instances in which unfair 
manipulation of the petitions was detected and corrected, but the 
prayers of the petitions here enumerated can scarcely admit of 
other interpretation; unless some such attempts had been made, 
such perpetual misgivings would not have arisen. There was no 
doubt a strong temptation, in case of any promise wrung by com- 
pulsion from the king, to insert in the enactment which embodied 
it a saving clause which would rob it of much of its value. The 
mischief wrought by these saving clauses was duly appreciated. 
By a salvo ordine meo, or "saving the rights of the church," 
the great prelates of the twelfth century had tried to escape from 
the obligations under which royal urgency had placed them, and 
had perpetuated if they had not originated the struggles between 
the crown and the clergy. Henry II, himself an adept in diplo- 
matic craft, had been provoked beyond endurance by the use of 
this weapon in the hands of Becket. Edward I had in vain 
attempted in 1299 to loosen the bonds in which his own promise 
had involved him, by an insertion of a proviso of the kind; and 



Growth of Parliamentary Powers 153 

again in 1300 the articles additional to the charters had contained 
an ample reservation of the rights of his prerogative. The in- 
stances, however, given above, which are found scattered through 
the whole records of the century, show that the weak point of the 
position of the commons was their attitude of petition. 

§ 11. Substitution of Bill for Petition 

The remedy for this was the adoption of a new form of initia- 
tion; the form of bill was substituted for that of petition; the 
statute was brought forward in the shape which it was in- 
tended ultimately to take, and every modification in the original 
draft passed under the eyes of the promoters. This change took 
place about the end of the reign of Henry VI. Henry V had 
been obliged to reply to a petition, in which the commons had 
insisted that no statutes should be enacted without their consent, 
that from henceforth nothing should "be enacted to the petitions 
of his commune that be contrairie of their asking, whereby they 
should be bound without their assent." This concession involves, 
it is true, the larger question of the position of the commons in 
legislation, but it amounts to a confession of the evil for the remedy 
of which so many prayers had been addressed in vain. 

§ 12. Difficulties in Securing Enj or cement of the Statutes 

The frequent disregard of petitions ostensibly granted, but not 
embodied in statutes, is proved by the constant repetition of the 
same requests in successive Parliaments, such for instance as the 
complaints about purveyance and the unconstitutional dealings 
with the customs, which we have already detailed. The difficulty 
of securing the execution of those which had become statutes is 
shown by the constant recurrence of petitions that the laws in 
general, and particular statutes, may be enforced ; even the funda- 
mental statutes of the constitution, the Great Charter, and the 
charter of the forests are not executed in a way that satisfies the 
commons, and the prayer is repeated so often as to show that little 
reliance was placed on the most solemn promises for the proper 
administration of the most solemn laws. It became a rule during 
the reign of Edward III for the first petition on the roll to contain 
a prayer for the observance of the Great Charter, and this may 
have been to some extent a mere formality. 

But the repeated complaints of the inefficiency of particular 



1^4 English Historians 

statutes are not capable of being so explained. Two examples 
may suffice: in 1355 the commons pray especially that the statute 
of the staple, the statute of 1340 on sheriffs, the statute of purvey- 
ance, the statute of weights and measures, and the statute of 
Westminster the First may be kept ; in each case the king assents. 
The annual appointment of sheriffs which was enacted by statute 
in 1340 is a constantly recurring subject of petitions of this sort. 
It would seem that the king tacitly overruled the operation of the 
act and prolonged the period of office as and when he pleased; 
the answer to the petition generally is affirmative, but Edward 
III in granting it made a curious reservation which seems equiva- 
lent to a refusal; in case a good sheriff should be found, his 
commission might be renewed and he himself sworn afresh. 
Richard II in 1384 deigned to argue the point with the commons; 
it was inexpedient, they were told, that the king should be for- 
bidden to reappoint a man who had for a year discharged loyally 
his duty to both king and people. In 1383 he had consented that 
commissions granting a longer tenure of the sheriffdom should be 
repealed, saving always to the king his prerogative in this case and 
in all others ; but now he declared simply that he would do what 
should seem best for his own profit and that of the people. He 
stated his reasons still more fully in 1397. 

If it were within the terms of the king's prerogative not merely 
to allow a statute to become inefficient for want of administrative 
industry, but actually to override an enactment like that fixing 
the duration of the sheriff's term of office, it was clearly not for- 
bidden him to interfere by direct and active measures with the 
observance of laws which he disliked. It is unnecessary to remark 
further on the cases of financial illegality in which the plain terms 
of statutes were transgressed, and which have been already noticed. 
These infractions of the constitution cannot be palliated by show- 
ing that an equal training of prerogative was admitted in other 
departments, but the examples that prove the latter show that 
finance was not the only branch of administration in which the 
line between legislative and executive machinery was very faintly 
drawn. The case of a king revoking a statute properly passed, 
sealed, and published, as Edward III did in 1341, is happily 
unique : that most arbitrary proceeding must have been at the 
time regarded as shameful, and was long remembered as a warning. 
Edward himself, by procuring the repeal of the obnoxious clauses 
in the Parliament of 1343, acknowledged the illegality of his own 
conduct. 



Growth of Parliamentary Powers 155 

The only event which can be compared with this is the summary 
annulment by John of Gaunt of the measures of the Good Parlia- 
ment, an act which the commons in the first Parliament of Richard 
II remarked on in general but unmistakable terms of censure; 
but the resolutions of the Good Parliament had not taken the form 
of statute, and so far as they were judicial might be set aside by 
the exercise of the royal prerogative of mercy. The royal power 
however of suspending the operation of a statute was not so 
determinately proscribed. The suspension of the constitutional 
clauses of the charter of Runneymede, which William Marshall, 
acting as regent, omitted in the re-issue of the charter of liberties 
in 1 2 16, shows that under certain circumstances such a power 
was regarded as necessary; and the assumption by Edward I, 
in 1297, of the attitude of a dictator, was excused, as it is partly 
justified, by the exigency of the moment. There are not, however, 
many instances in which so dangerous a weapon was resorted to. 
The most significant are those in which the king was acting diplo- 
matically and trying to satisfy at once the pope and the Parliament. 
Thus in 1307 Edward I, almost as soon as he had passed the statute 
of Carlisle, which ordered that no money raised by the taxation of 
ecclesiastical property should be carried beyond the sea, was com- 
pelled by the urgent entreaty of the papal envoy to suspend the 
operation of the law in favor of the pope; in letters patent he 
announced to his people that he had allowed the papal agents to 
execute their office, to collect the first-fruits of vacant benefices, 
and to send them to the pope by way of exchange through the 
merchants, notwithstanding the prohibitions enacted in Parlia- 
ment. 

The whole history of the statute of provisors is one long story 
of similar tactics, a compromise between the statute law and the 
religious obedience which was thought due to the apostolic see ; 
by regarding the transgression of the law simply as an infraction of 
the royal right of patronage, to be condoned by the royal license, 
the royal administration virtually conceded all that the popes 
demanded; the persons promoted by the pope renounced all words 
prejudicial to the royal authority which occurred in the bulls of 
appointment, and when the king wished to promote a servant he 
availed himself of the papal machinery to evade the rights of the 
cathedral chapters. This compromise was viewed with great 
dislike by the Parliaments; in 1391 the knights of the shire threw 
out a proposal to repeal the statute of provisors, which had lately 
been made more rigorous, although the proposal was supported 



156 English Historians 

by the king and the Duke of Lancaster ; but they allowed the king 
until the next Parliament to overrule the operation of the statute. 

§13. Exercise of Dispensing Power 

The more common plan of dispensing by special license with 
the operation of a statute, in the way of pardons and grants of 
immunity, was less dangerous to the constitution and less clearly 
opposed to the theory of the monarchy as accepted in the Middle 
Ages. Yet against the lavish exercise of this prerogative the com- 
mons are found remonstrating from time to time in tones suffi- 
ciently peremptory. The power was restricted by the statute of 
Northampton passed in 1328; but in 1330 and 1347 the king was 
told that the facilities for obtaining pardons were so great that 
murders and all sorts of felonies were committed without restraint; 
the commons in the latter year prayed that no such pardons might 
be issued without consent of Parliament, and the king, in his answer, 
undertook that no such charters should thenceforth be issued unless 
for the honor and profit of himself and of his people. A similar 
petition was presented in 13 51, and instances might be multiplied 
which would seem to show that this evil was not merely an abuse 
of the royal attribute of mercy or a defeat of the ordinary processes 
of justice, but a regularly systematized perversion of prerogative, 
by the manipulation of which the great people of the realm, whether 
as maintainers or otherwise, attempted to secure for their retainers 
and those who could purchase their support, an exemption from 
the operation of "the law. 

Even thus viewed, however, it belongs rather to the subject of 
judicature than to legislation. 

These were the direct ways of thwarting the legal enactments 
to which the king had given an unwilling consent. Indirectly the 
same end was obtained by means which, if not less distinctly 
unconstitutional, were less distinctly illegal; that is, by obtaining 
petitions for the reversal of recent legislation, or by influencing the 
elections in order to obtain a subservient majority. For both of 
these devices the short duration of the Parliaments afforded great 
facilities, and under Edward III and Richard II both were 
adopted. In 1377, for instance, the awards of the Good Parliament 
were annulled on the petition of a packed House of Commons. In 
13 5 1 the commons prayed that no statute might be changed in 
consequence of the bill presented by any single person; in 1348 
that for no bill delivered in this Parliament in the name of the 



Growth of Parliamentary Powers 157 

commons or of anyone else might the answers already given to their 
petitions be altered. The king in the former case asked an ex- 
planation of the request, but in the latter he replied more at length. 
"Already the king had by the advice of the magnates replied to the 
petitions of the commons touching the law of the land, that the 
laws had and used in times past and the process thereon formerly 
used, could not be changed without making a new statute on the 
matter, which the king neither then nor since had for certain causes 
been able to undertake ; but as soon as he could undertake it, he 
would take the great men and the wise men of the council, and 
would ordain upon these articles and others touching the amend- 
ment of the law by their advice and council, in such manner that 
reason and equity should be done to all his lieges and subjects, 
and to each one of them." This answer is in full accord with the 
policy of the king; it is a plausible profession of good intentions, 
but an evasive answer to the question put to him. 



PART III 

MEDLEVAL INSTITUTIONS 

CHAPTER I 

THE GROWTH OF AN ENGLISH MANOR 

In his Introduction to English Economic History and Theory, 
Professor Ashley has given a clear and concise description of what 
may be regarded as a typical English manor in the eleventh century. 
He cautions us, however, not to forget the great divergences from 
the type to be found in all parts of the country, owing to the im- 
mense variety of private arrangements possible. After a careful 
study of Professor Ashley's chapter, the student will read with 
peculiar interest the article by Professor Maitland in the English 
Historical Review on "The Growth of an English Manor." In 
this article we not only get a detailed description of the arrange- 
ments of an actual manor, but we also see the changes that went 
on from generation to generation until serfdom disappeared and 
the manor entered upon the modern age. 

§ i. Thirteenth-Century Descriptions of the Manor oj Wilburton 1 

It is not often that one has the good fortune of being able to 
study a series of mediaeval documents at one's own time and in 
one's own house; but this was given to me by the late Mr. O. C. 
Pell, lord of the manor of Wilburton, in the county of Cambridge. 
He committed to my care a splendid line of court and account rolls 
which, though there were some gaps in it, stretched from Ed- 

1 The English Historical Review, Vol. IX, 1894, pp. 417 ff. By permis- 
sion of Professor Maitland and Messrs. Longmans, Green, & Company, 
Publishers. 

158 



The Growth of an English Manor 159 

ward I to Henry VII, and now, the consent of his successor, Mr. 
Albert Pell, having been very kindly given, I am able to lay before 
the readers of this Review a fairly continuous history of a par- 
ticular English manor during the later Middle Ages; and to me 
it seems that at the present time we have some need for histories 
of particular manors, for I am convinced that the time has not yet 
come when generalities about the English manor and its fortunes 
will be safe or sound. 

The manor of Wilburton, on the edge of the fen, formed part 
of the ancient estates of the Church of Ely. It is fully described 
in two "extents," the one made in 1221, the other in 1277. Of 
these its late lord, who was deeply interested in its history, gave 
an account in the Proceedings of the Cambridge Antiquarian 
Society. I shall here speak of them very briefly, for they are' but 
the prelude to those documents which are the theme of this essay. 

The two extents begin by describing the demesne land — that 
is, the land which is in the lord's own hand. In the extent of 
1277 he has 216 acres ("by the lesser hundred and the perch of 
16^ feet") of arable land, and besides this he has meadow land 
and a wide expanse of fen. In the next place an account is given 
of the holdings of the "freeholders" and "hundredors" (de 
hundredariis et libere tenentibus). Of these there are nine, one 
with 16 acres de wara, four with 12 acres de wara apiece, 
two with 6 acres apiece, two with 2\ acres apiece. This arrange- 
ment remained constant during the half century which elapsed 
between the two surveys. These "freeholders " and "hundredors " 
pay small money rents — the holder of 12 acres pays 2 d. a year; 
they owe two days' ploughing in Lent and two in winter, for 
which they receive id. a day; they have to attend the great 
boon day in autumn. They owe suit to the court of Wilburton and 
must attend the hundred court, which is in the bishop's hand; 
hence their designation as hundredarii. In the later extent it 
is expressly stated that they owe a heriot (best beast, or 3 2d.), 
a fine for marrying their daughters (32c?.), leyrwite and tallage; 
the gersuma, or fine for marrying a daughter, is mentioned in the 
earlier extent. 

In the court rolls the existence of freeholders can from time to 
time be detected. They owe suit of court ; they are often amerced 
for not doing it or compound for it with a small sum of money. 
There are entries also which show that they still owe ploughing 
service and that some of them are very lax in performing it. 
Again, descents and alienations are sometimes presented and the 



160 English Historians 

heriot is still due. But on the whole these freeholders seem to 
have played only a small part in the manor; the names which 
occur on the court rolls are chiefly those of customary tenants. 

In the extents the description of the freehold tenements is 
followed by the heading De Operariis et Plenis Terris. The 
full land {plena terra) consists of 12 acres de war a. Of this 
thorny phrase de wara I will here say nothing — its interest lies 
in a remote past — save this, that as a matter of fact the full' land 
at Wilburton really consisted of 24 acres. Of these full 
lands there are 15-j. The holder of such a tenement pays igd. a 
year — i2d. as wite penny, 6d. as sedge silver, id. as ward penny. 
From Michaelmas to Hokeday he does two works a week, accord- 
ing to the earlier survey, three according to the later; from 
Hokeday to Lammas three works a week; from Lammas to 
Michaelmas five works a week; and besides all this there is a 
good deal to be done which is not computed as part of the reg- 
ular week work. On the whole the services, which are more 
elaborately described in the later than in the earlier of the two 
surveys, and which perhaps have become heavier during the 
interval, are of the familiar type. 

Then there are 10J cottage tenements, which even in Henry 
VII's day still preserved a relic of the Domesday terminology in 
the name "cossetles." The holder of each such tenement paid 
jd. a year — <\d. for wite pound, 2d. for sedge silver, id. for ward 
penny — and did two works in every week. The holders of the 
full lands and the cottiers owe suit to the lord's mill, a fine for 
marrying their daughters, leyrwite and tallage; they cannot sell 
colt or ox without the lord's leave. 

We already see that a basis has been fixed for the commutation 
of labor into money. Every "work" in autumn is, as we are 
told, worth one penny, and out of autumn every work is worth a 
halfpenny; we also see that one half-cotaria is held by a tenant 
who "at the will of the lord " pays 2s. a year in lieu of his labors; 
but the profit of the manor is reckoned mainly in "works." In 
the way of money rents the lord draws but 3 is. a year from the 
manor, besides some small dues ; on the other hand 37733- "works " 
are owed to him, by a "work" being meant the work of one man 
for one day. 

From 1 22 1 down to the very end of the Middle Ages the manor 
seems to have kept with wonderful conservatism what we may call 
its external shape — that is to say, at the end of this period the 
distribution of the customary tenements into "full lands" and 



The Growth of an English Manor 161 

"cossetles," or cottier tenements, was still preserved, though the 
"full land" was often broken into two "half-lands." 

§ 2. The Sale and Discharge of Works 

At the beginning of the fourteenth century we see that some of 
the "works" were done in kind, while others were "sold to the 
homage." Thus there is an account for seventeen weeks in the 
winter of 1303-1304 during which the temporalities of the See of 
Ely were in the king's hand; in this the bailiff and reeve, after 
charging themselves with the rents of assize {i.e. the fixed money 
rents), proceed to account for 10s. lod. for "260 winter works 
sold to the homage at the rate of a halfpenny per work." In a 
later part of the account we see how this number of "works" 
is arrived at — the officers account for 1385 works arising from 
15^ "full lands" and 10 cottier tenements; they then set against 
this number the 260 works sold to the homage, 355 works sold 
to the executors of the late bishop, 57 works excused to the reeve 
and reaper, 38 works excused to the smith, 19 works due from a 
half-cotaria which has been let at a fixed rent, 14^ works excused 
on account of the Christmas holiday, 363^ works the amount of 
ploughing done, 258 works the amount of harrowing done, 20 
works in repairing the ditch around the park at Downham, thus 
getting out the total of 1385 works. 

A little later comes a series of accounts for some consecutive 
years in Edward II's reign. The basis of these accounts, so far 
as works come in question, is that 2943 winter and summer works, 
valued at a halfpenny apiece, are due, and 845 autumn works 
valued at a penny. These numbers seem subject to some slight 
fluctuations, due to the occurrence of leap years and other causes. 
Then the accountants have to show how in one way or another 
these works have been discharged, and in the first place they must 
account for "works sold." In the year ending at Michaelmas, 
1322, the accountants charged themselves with the value of 12 13 
winter and summer works and 6o^ autumn works which have been 
"sold," in the next year with the value of 1297^ winter and sum- 
mer works and 170J autumn works; in the next year with the 
value of 1496 winter and summer works and 149 autumn works; 
in the next year with the value of 1225^ winter and summer works 
and 218^ autumn works; in the next year with the value of 1023 
winter and summer works and 247^ autumn works ; in the next 
year with the value of 1381 winter and summer works and 63 J 

M 



1 62 English Historians 

autumn works. In these and in the later accounts it is not usual 
to state to whom or in what manner these "works" were "sold" ; 
but there can be little doubt that they were sold to those who 
were bound to do them — that is to say, when the lord did not 
want the full number of works he took money instead at the rate 
of a halfpenny for a winter or summer work and of a penny for 
an autumn work. The phrase "works sold to the homage," 
which occurs in the accounts of Edward I's time, may perhaps 
suggest that the whole body of tenants were jointly liable for the 
money which thus became due in lieu of works. 

It will be seen that the number of "works sold " does not amount 
to half the number o*f works due. How were the rest discharged ? 
In the first place some were released; thus the reeve, the reaper, 
and the smith stood excused; and then again holidays were 
allowed on festivals ; thus the occurrence of the feasts of St. Law- 
rence and St. Bartholomew serves to discharge a certain number 
of the autumn works. But very many of the works were actually 
done ; thus in one year 203 "diets " of ploughing between Michael- 
mas and Hokeday discharge 406 works; in the previous year 
377 works had been discharged in similar fashion; in the year 
before that 406; in the year before that 420^. Ploughing, mow- 
ing, harrowing and the like are always wanted; other works are 
accounted for now in one fashion, now in another. In one year 
26 works were spent on the vineyard at Ely, in another 3 works 
were spent in catching rabbits ; but on the whole the opera are 
laid out in much the same manner in each successive year. 

§ 3. The Manorial Accounts in Edward IPs Day 

I have examined the accounts for the last six years of Edward 
II's reign; their scheme is as follows: The accountant is the 
reeve ; his year runs from Michaelmas to Michaelmas. He begins 
by debiting himself with the arrears of previous years. The next 
item consists of "Rents of Assize." These are the old money 
dues payable by freeholders and customary tenants ; they amount 
to no great sum, about 2/., but show a slight tendency to in- 
crease, owing to the "arrentation" of some of the minor services; 
for instance, iod. is accounted for in respect of a release of the 
duty of collecting sticks in the park at Somersham. Next comes 
"Farm of Land," a single item of 325. in respect of 24 acres of 
demesne land which have been let at a rent. By far the most 
important item is "Sale of Crops," a very variable item, rluctuat- 



The Growth of an English Manor 163 

ing between 81. and 54/. Then follows "Sale of Stock." Then 
comes "Issues of the Manor" (Exitus Manerii). Under this 
head the reeve accounts for the number of "works" that have 
been "sold," also on occasion for the price of fowls and turf. 
The "Perquisites of the Court" comprise not only the amerce- 
ments, but also the fines payable on alienation of the customary 
tenements and the like. The last item consists of "Sales accounted 
for on the back of the Roll " ; these seem to consist chiefly of 
sales of malt. The total income varies between very wide limits, 
rising to 66/., falling to less than 20/. 

On the credit side the first heading is "Allowances" or "Ac- 
quittances." A sum of 3d. has to be allowed because the reeve 
is excused that sum from his rent. Under "Custus Carucarum" 
stands the cost of making and repairing ploughs, shoeing horses, 
and so forth. About 55. per annum is spent in paying 2d. per 
plough per day for every one of the sixteen ploughs of the tenants 
engaged in the "boon ploughing" for winter seed and for spring 
seed. The "Cost of Carts" is sometimes separately accounted 
for; the cost of "Repairs of Buildings" is by no means heavy. 
Under "Minute Necessaries" fall the price of various articles 
purchased, also the wages of the only money-wage-receiving labor- 
ers who are employed on the manor — namely, a swineherd at 
45. 4<i. per annum and an occasionally employed shepherd at 5s. 
a year. "Threshing and Winnowing " are paid for as piece work. 
"Purchase of Corn" and "Purchase of Stock" are headings that 
need no comment. Under "Mowing and Harvesting" {Falcatio 
et A utumpnus) we find no heavy charge ; all that has to be paid 
for is the tenant's harvest dinner, and the wages during harvest 
of the reeve and the "repereve." Sometimes under the head of 
"Forinsec" (or Foreign) "Expenses" occur a few small sums not 
expended directly on the manor. 

The reeve then accounts for the money that he has paid into 
the Exchequer at Ely, and then the account is balanced and gener- 
ally leaves him in debt. Apparently the annual profit of the 
manor varies between very wide limits. The reason of this fluctua- 
tion is to be found chiefly in the sales of corn. The highest 
prices of the wheat sold in these six years are as follows : — 

s. d. s. d. 

1321-2 ...120 per quarter 1324-5 ... 70 per quarter. 

1322-3 . . . 11 o per quarter 1325-6 ... 50 per quarter. 

1323-4 ... 72 per quarter 1326-7 ... 34 per quarter. 



164 English Historians 

Such figures as these, though they may be familiar enough to 
economists, are worth notice, for they show us that however stable 
an institution the manor may have been from century to century, 
agriculture involved a very high degree of risk. 

On the back of the account roll the reeve proceeds to account 
for the produce of the manor and the " works" of the ten- 
ants. First comes Com pot us Grangie ("Barn Account"). The 
reeve has received so many quarters of wheat from the barn; 
so many have gone in seed, so many in provender for the manorial 
servants, so many remain in the barn. Rye, barley, pease, oats, 
and malt have to be similarly accounted for ; the account is checked 
by tallies between the reeve, the reaper, and the barnkeeper. 
There are four ploughmen and one shepherd who are famuli 
manerii and in receipt of corn, each of them getting one quar- 
ter per week during some twelve weeks of the year. Next 
comes Compotus Staiiri ("Account of Live Stock"), under 
which heading the horses, oxen, and pigs are enumerated. Then 
under Compotus Operum ("Account of Works") the reeve 
has to show, as explained above, how some 3700 works have 
been discharged, the autumn works, worth a penny apiece, 
being distinguished from the winter and summer works, worth 
a halfpenny. 

Now, glancing at the manor as a whole, we see that to a very 
large extent it is still dependent on the labors of its villeins. The 
whole amount received by way of rent is but 2/. 105., or thereabouts, 
while the price of works sold brings in some 3/. or 4/. Almost all 
the regular agricultural work, with the exception of threshing and 
winnowing, is done for the lord by his tenants. He is as yet no 
great "employer of labor" in the modern sense; wages are a 
comparatively trifling item in his accounts. He generally employs 
a hired swineherd and a hired shepherd, and during some part of 
the year he has ploughmen, who are paid in grain. But the main 
part of his ploughing, reaping, mowing, harrowing, is done by 
those who are bound to do it by status or tenure. . . . 

§ 4. The Manor at the Close of the Fourteenth Century 

From the reign of Edward III there are no accounts ; but turn- 
ing to those of Richard II's time we find that the theory of the 
account, so far as "works" are concerned, is still the same. It is 
now reckoned that there are 2970 winter and summer works, 
worth a halfpenny apiece, and 8.13 autumn works worth a penny 



The Growth of an English Manor 165 

apiece, to be accounted for. Some of these works are "sold," 
some not sold; thus in the year ending Michaelmas, 1393, we 
find 183 works of the one class and 93 of the other class ac- 
counted for as sold. The number of works sold varies much from 
year to year. 

Many hundred works are still done in kind ; but the number 
so done has been diminished, because no less than four full 
lands and nine cottier tenements "are in the lord's hand" and 
have been let out at money rents. This has introduced into 
the account a new element — namely, "Rent of Bond Land" 
{Firma Terre Nativa) or {Firma Terre Nativorum), which 
brings in about 9/. a year. A large number of opera has, there- 
fore, to be subtracted on this score, e.g. 528 winter and summer 
works in respect of the said 4 full lands and 836 similar works 
in respect of the said 9 cottier tenancies. 

Exactly when or how the change occurred the extent accounts 
do not show. Already in the first year of Richard II there were 3 
full lands and 8| cottier tenements, let at a rent for short terms 
of years and doing no work. But by connecting the accounts 
with the court rolls we are enabled to infer that these lands 
were vacated by villeins who fled late in the reign of Edward III ; 
thus the first full land on the list is that of John Thorold, who 
fled in 1376 or thereabouts, and of whose flight the court rolls 
continue to talk for the next forty years. 

Turning, therefore, to the court rolls, we find many entries 
which seem to show that during the last half of the fourteenth 
century and the first quarter of the fifteenth the lord had great 
difficulty in keeping and finding customary tenants on the old 
terms. . . . 

At the very end of the fourteenth century many of the old "works" 
were exacted. In some years more were "sold," in some less. 
In the year ending Michaelmas, 1397, only eight out of 2970 winter 
and summer works were sold ; some 800 were actually done, 
many of the others were discharged by the fact that four of the 
full lands and no less than ten of the cottage tenements had fallen 
into the lord's hand and had been let by him either permanently 
or temporarily at money rents. And on the whole the economy 
of the manor is far from being an economy of cash payments. 
The lord is no great payer of wages. For the regular field work 
he has no need of hired laborers ; his only permanent wage-receiv- 
ing hind is a shepherd; but there are ploughmen who receive 
allowances of grain. 



1 66 English Historians 



§ 5. The Manor in the Fifteenth Century 

Passing on now to Henry IV's reign, we find that the old mode 
of reckoning is still preserved. There are still 2970 winter and 
summer works due, but 5 full lands and 10 cottier tenements have 
fallen into the lord's hand and bring in nothing but money; more 
than 10/. has now to be accounted for as "Rent of Bond Lands," 
and a proportionate number of works has to be subtracted. Of 
the other works some are sold ; in one year 204 of the winter and 
summer works are sold, while 114 have been discharged by harrow- 
ing. In 1407, however, the basis of the account was changed; 
it became a recognized fact that 6 full lands were no longer in 
opere, and the total number of winter and summer works to be 
accounted for was reduced to 1188 and that of autumn works 
to 378. 

A great change seems to have taken place soon after this, dur- 
ing a period for which we have no accounts. In the first year of 
Henry VI (1423) the "Rent of Bond Lands" has risen to 22/. 
All the "works" seem now to be released (relaxantur custumariis 
domini) except the boon ploughing: 76 "diets" of ploughing 
due from the customers whether free or bond. Very shortly 
after this, in or about 1426, another great change was made. 
The demesne of the manor, containing 246 acres of arable land 
and 42 acres of meadow, was let to farm at a rent of 8/., and the 
demise of the land which had been actually in the lord's hand 
seems to have carried with it the right to the ploughing service; 
that service, therefore, no longer concerns the bishop while the 
lease lasts. The demesne land is let cum operibus et consue- 
tudinibus omnium customariorum operabilium. This soon leads 
to a great simplification and abbreviation of the 'accounts, an 
abbreviation to be measured in feet. The receipts are now the 
old assize rents, the rent of the demesne, the rents of the bond 
lands, the perquisites of the court ; the opera are no longer brought 
into the account, and the purchases and sales of stock and crops 
disappear, for these, of course, concern the firmarius, not the 
lord. The firmarius, it may be noted, is just one of the men of 
the vill, one of the copyholders, as we may now call them; in 
the first instance he is the same man who is acting as reeve. 

Thenceforward the bishop seems to have been able to keep the 
demesne land in lease, now one, now another of the copyholders 
taking it for a term of years : thus under Edward IV it was let for 



The Growth of an English Manor 167 

16 years at a rent of 7/. It is always recognized that the subject 
of this demise comprises "the customs and works of the customary 
tenants of the lord." Meanwhile the "Rent of Bond" or "Na- 
tives' Land," which has declined from 22/. to about 17/., remains 
constant. . . . 

This evidence therefore seems to point to a great change under 
Henry V (1413-1422). In the last year of Henry IV the rent of 
the bond lands is entered at 1 1/. $s. 6d. ; it is still reckoned that 
1056 halfpenny works and 336 penny works are due; many of 
these are actually done in kind, though some are "sold." When 
the account begins again under Henry VI the rent of bond lands 
is 22/. 2s. iod., almost exactly double the old amount, and all the 
works that are accounted for are 76 diets of ploughing. This 
change was immediately followed by another — namely, the letting 
of the demesne, the scitus manerii, as it is sometimes called — 
together with the benefit of whatever opera remained uncommuted. 
Whether the commutation under Henry V was originally regarded 
as more than a temporary or revocable measure does not appear; 
practically it seems to have been the final step. . . . 



§ 6. Summary of the Development of the Manor 

The conclusions to which these rolls would lead us may now 
be stated in a summary fashion. 

Before 1350 or thereabouts. — The lord gets very little by way of 
money rent. His demesne is cultivated for him by the "works" 
of his customary tenants. More works are due than are wanted, 
and each year he sells a certain number of works at a customary 
rate — that is to say, he takes from the person liable to w T ork a 
penny or, as the case may be, a halfpenny in respect of each work 
that he does not want. The customary tenants are for the most 
part, if not altogether, unfree men, and are treated as such. 

From 1350 to 1410 or thereabouts. — There is as yet no per- 
manent commutation of work for rent. The lord, however, finds 
the greatest difficulty in keeping old and obtaining new tenants; 
his tenants, more especially the cottagers, run away and relinquish 
their tenements. The lord still hopes to obtain tenants on the 
old terms, but in the meanwhile has to make temporary grants or 
leases at money rents, and from time to time to reduce those rents. 
From the tenants who still hold on the old terms, he still exacts 
a considerable number of works, while other works he "sells" 





1 68 English Historians 

to them year by year. Many of the tenants are still unfree and are 
treated as such. 

After 1410 or thereabouts. — It having at last been recognized 
that many of the tenements are no longer in opere, and that there 
is no prospect of a return to the old state of things, a general 
commutation of all works (except some ploughing) takes place. 
Perhaps this is not at once conceived as a final change, but prac- 
tically it is irrevocable. The rents are the best rents that the lord 
can get, and in course of time it is necessary to reduce them. The 
demesne land, together with the benefit of such works as are un- 
commuted, is now let, for short terms of years, to a farmer. The 
lord of the manor becomes, in effect, little more than a receiver 
of rent. Very few practical traces of personal servitude remain, 
but we read of no formal emancipation of the bondmen, and the 
lord is careful to preserve a record of their bondage. 

In the Sixteenth Century. — Owing to the fall in the value of 
money, the copyholder gradually acquires a valuable right in his 
holding. His rent — less than a shilling an acre — becomes 
light. I will not generalize, but to me it seems that in this instance 
the copyholder's vendible interest is almost entirely an unearned 
increment, the product of American mines. 

Bibliographical Note 

Cheney, The Disappearance of English Serfdom, in the English Histori- 
cal Review, 1900, pp. 20-37. Leadam, The Security of Copyholders in the 
Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries, in the English Historical Review, 1893, 
pp. 684 ff. Page, The End of Villeinage in England. Trevelyan, England 
in the Age of Wycliffe. 



CHAPTER II 

THE MEDIAEVAL GILDS 

A study of the manor as a part of mediaeval economy must be 
supplemented by an examination of the towns and their gilds. 
Though the population of the towns at the Norman Conquest 
constituted a small part of the population of the kingdom, their 
political and financial influence was doubtless out of proportion 
to their numerical strength. Moreover, they steadily increased in 
numbers and power, especially after the introduction of parlia- 
mentary institutions. Though the origins of early towns and their 
internal government are the subjects of considerable controversy, 
the student will do well to take as his starting-point Professor 
Ashley's chapter on the gilds, which is a very clear and systematic 
treatment of the subject. 

§ i . The Origin of English Towns 1 

At the time of the Norman Conquest there were some eighty 
towns in England. Most of these were what we should now 
consider but large villages ; they were distinguished from the vil- 
lages around only by the earthen walls that surrounded them, or 
the earthen mounds that kept watch over them. London, Win- 
chester, Bristol, Norwich, York, and Lincoln were far in advance 
of the rest in size and importance ; but even a town of the first 
rank cannot have had more than seven or eight thousand inhab- 
itants. We shall perhaps be not far wrong if we estimate the 
town population at about a hundred and fifty thousand out of a 
total population of about a million and a half. 

As to how these towns had come into existence, it were scarcely 
profitable to construct any definite theory until the condition of 

1 Ashley, An Introduction to English Economic History and Theory, Pt. I, 
pp. 68 ff. By permission of Professor Ashley and G. P. Putnam's Sons, 
Publishers. 

169 



170 English Historians 

the body of the population of early England has been more satis- 
factorily determined than it is at present. But it is readily seen 
that population would tend to congregate at places where high- 
roads crossed one another, or where rivers could be forded ; such 
places, indeed, would in many cases be of strategic importance, and 
so would come to be fortified. There is no reason to suppose 
that any monastic orders, before the Cistercians, " lived of set 
purpose in the wilderness"; monasteries and cathedral churches 
were placed where villages were already in existence. But be- 
neath the shelter of the monasteries the villages soon grew into 
small towns; the labor services to which their inhabitants were 
bound, or the commutation for them which they paid, long testi- 
fying to the originally servile character of the holdings. Many a 
village around the fortified house or castle of some great noble 
had a similar history. 

Such towns necessarily became centres of what little internal 
trade there was. For although agriculture long remained one 
of the principal employments of the burgesses, yet it must have 
early been necessary for supplies of food to be brought from the 
country around; this is the most primitive and essential form of 
trade. The lords, to whom the towns were subject, would see 
their interest in the establishment of markets in which protection 
was guaranteed, and paid for in the shape of tolls; and so came 
into existence those weekly or half-weekly market days which, 
in spite of improved means of communication, are still so impor- 
tant in England. 

Commerce with the Frank kingdom had long been carried on 
from London and the ports of Kent, especially Sandwich and 
Dover. Traffic with the Danish settlements on the Irish coast, 
a traffic in which slaves were the chief commodities, brought Ches- 
ter and Bristol into prominence in the tenth and eleventh centuries ; 
and the connection with the Scandinavian kingdoms, caused by 
Canute's conquest, brought York, Grimsby, Lincoln, Norwich, 
Ipswich, and many other ports along the eastern coast, into active 
commercial communication with the Baltic countries. Yet the 
trade with foreign countries cannot have been large; the wares 
which, in an old English dialogue, the merchant describes himself 
as bringing with him, seem to be all articles of luxury such as 
would be needed only by the higher classes, — " purple cloth, silk, 
costly gems and gold, garments, pigments, wine, oil, ivory and 
brass, copper and tin, sulphur, glass, and such like." The men- 
tion of merchants in the English laws is so infrequent that we can 



The Mediaeval Gilds 171 

hardly suppose that any considerable trading class had come into 
existence. 

In the troublous years which followed the landing of the Con- 
queror the more important English towns suffered greatly; in 
some cases a third or half the houses were destroyed, and the 
population reduced in like proportion — a result to which the 
chances of war and William's policy of castle-building contributed 
in equal measure. But even during the twenty years before the 
great survey of 1086, the towns on the southern coast had begun to 
profit by the closer connection with the opposite shore. And as 
soon as the Norman rule was firmly established, it secured for the 
country an internal peace and order such as it had never before 
enjoyed; the temporary retrogression was more than made up 
for, and in town after town arose the merchant gild. 

§ 2. Character and Origin of the Merchant Gild 

The merchant gild, or hanse, for the words are used synony- 
mously, was a society formed primarily for the purpose of obtain- 
ing and maintaining the privilege of carrying on trade — a 
privilege which implied the possession of a monopoly of trade in 
each town by the gild brethren as against its other inhabitants, 
and also liberty to trade in other towns. The exact character of 
the monopoly probably varied somewhat from place to place. 
Everywhere, apparently, non-members were left free to buy and 
sell victuals; but if they went further and engaged in regular 
trade, they became subject to tolls from which the gild brethren 
were free. If the trader was prosperous enough to pay the en- 
trance money and become a member of the gild, but obstinately 
refrained from doing so, he was coerced into compliance by re- 
peated fines. In some places a promise to inform the gild officers 
of any man trafficking in the town and able to enter the gild was 
part of the entrance oath of every brother. Each member paid 
an entrance fee, and probably other dues to the gild chest, which 
were spent for the common purposes of the gild, especially in 
festivities. And since no society could be conceived of in the 
Middle Ages without some sort of jurisdiction over its members, 
the gild merchant, in its meetings known as "morning-speeches," 
drew up regulations for trade and punished breaches of commercial 
morality. 

Now there certainly had existed before the Conquest both 
religious gilds and frith gilds, i.e. clubs or societies for the per- 



172 English Historians 

formance of certain pious offices, and for mutual assistance in the 
preservation of peace. It is quite possible, therefore, that similar 
societies for the purpose of trade may have been formed equally 
early ; but the first positive mention of a merchant gild is certainly 
not earlier than 1093. With the reign of Henry I begins the long 
series of charters granted to towns by the king or other lords.' 
Under Henry II such charters were obtained, among other places, 
by Bristol, Durham, Lincoln, Carlisle, Oxford, Salisbury, South- 
ampton; and in all these charters the recognition of a merchant 
gild occupies a prominent place. Indeed, the lawyer Glanvill, 
writing at this time, regards the commune, i.e. the body of citizens 
with rights of municipal self-government, as identical with the 
gild merchant. Such merchant gilds may have been in existence 
for some time before they were recognized by charter; the value 
of the charter lay rather in the sanction which it gave to the coer- 
cive action of the society, and the rights which it secured for its 
members in other than their own towns. In spite of the paucity 
of evidence, the existence of a merchant gild can be definitely 
proved in ninety-two towns out of the hundred and sixty represented 
at one time or other in the Parliaments of Edward I. No consid- 
erable name — with two exceptions ; namely, London and the 
Cinque Ports — is wanting from the list. It is impossible not to 
conclude that every town, down to those that were not much 
more than villages, had its merchant gild. This fact of itself is 
enough to prove the great part it must have played in the town life 
of the time. 

The evident similarity of the regulations of those four gilds 
whose ordinances have been preserved, in places so far apart as 
Totnes, Southampton, Leicester, and Berwick, can only be ex- 
plained by supposing that merchant gilds all over England had 
much the same organization. Each was presided over by an 
alderman (in some cases two), with two or four assistants, usually 
known as wardens or echevins; and sometimes there were stew- 
ards also. There was generally a small inner 'council of twelve 
or twenty-four. The alderman and wardens, besides summoning 
and presiding over the meetings and festivities, managed the 
funds of the society, as well as its estates when, as was frequently 
the case, the gild had purchased or otherwise acquired land. 

§ 3. Membership in the Merchant Gild 

Who were eligible for membership it is impossible with certainty 
to determine. It is clear that the association included a very 



The Mediaeval Gilds 173 

considerable number of persons, e.g. as many as two hundred in 
the small town of Totnes; that while it embraced merchants 
travelling to distant markets, it did not, at any rate at first, exclude 
craftsmen as such ; that the eldest sons or heirs of gildsmen had 
a right to free admission, and younger sons on paying a smaller 
entrance fee than others ; and that, certainly also at first, members 
could give or sell their rights, and transmit them to heiresses, who 
might exercise them themselves or give them to their husbands or 
sons. 

The most usual term for the rights of membership was seat, 
sedes ; members were said to seek, have, sell, or give their seat, 
which was often described as below or above that of another — 
a phrase possibly referring originally to a place in the market. 
The word gild is also sometimes used for all the rights of mem- 
bership, though more frequently for the meetings of the society, 
especially for the solemn gatherings once or twice a year. 

We know that merchants from other towns were admitted to 
membership, and that the same privileges were often obtained by 
neighboring monasteries and lords of manors. But clearly the 
bulk of the members belonged to the town itself, and there are 
strong reasons for supposing that, of the inhabitants, only such 
were admitted to membership as held land within the town boun- 
daries — the burgage tenants, burgenses or cives, burgesses or 
citizens par excellence, who alone were fully qualified members of 
the town assembly. 

We must not, however, regard the members of the gild as being 
all of them great merchants. In most towns agriculture was still 
one of the main occupations of the burgesses ; but most holders 
of land would find it desirable to sell at any rate their surplus 
produce. The articles most frequently mentioned in the gild docu- 
ments — skins, wool, corn, etc. — show that the trade consisted 
almost entirely in the sale and purchase of the raw products of 
agriculture. It has already been noticed that non-members were 
often permitted to buy and sell subject to the payment of tolls, 
but in some cases trade in certain articles was entirely forbidden 
to them, e.g. in skins. More important still is it to observe that 
in some places the manufacture of cloth had become so consid- 
erable that the merchant gild thought it worth while to obtain 
from the king a monopoly of the retail sale of the dyed cloth used 
by the upper classes, or even of the retail sale of all cloth. We 
shall see later how these privileges brought them into conflict 
with the craft gilds. 



174 English Historians 



§ 4. Gild Regulations 

We have noticed that the gild assemblies, or its officers on its 
behalf, drew up regulations and exercised a jurisdiction in matters 
of trade. These regulations illustrate clearly a characteristic com- 
mon both to the merchant and craft gilds; namely, that while 
each individual member was within certain limits allowed to pursue 
his own interests as he thought best, there was nevertheless a 
strong feeling that the trade or industry was the common interest 
of the whole body ; that each was bound to submit to regulations 
for the common good, and to come to the assistance of his fellow- 
members. Thus it was ordered in Leicester that the dealers in 
cloth, going to the fair of S. Botolph in Boston, should place 
themselves on the southern side of the market, and the wool dealers 
on the northern. Somewhat later it was provided that the Leices- 
ter merchants at Boston should always display their cloth for sale 
within the "range" in which the Leicester men were accustomed 
to stand, under penalty of having to pay a tun of ale. A man 
might, indeed, for the sake of security, take his cloth home with 
him at night to a lodging outside the "range," but he was not to 
sell it outside the row. Only in such a way was it possible to 
exercise any supervision over those who claimed to come from 
Leicester; and only in this way could a fraudulent dealer be 
hindered from ruining the credit of the town's wares. But in 
return for these restrictions the gildsman gained the benefit of 
protection. If a gildsman of Southampton were put into prison 
in any part of England, the alderman and the steward with one 
of the echevins were bound to go at the cost of the gild to procure 
his deliverance. At Berwick "two or three of the gild " were bound 
to "labor" on behalf of any one in danger of losing life or limb, 
though only for two days at the gild's expense. Individuals were 
not to monopolize the advantages of trade. In Southampton, 
while a bargain was being made, any other member could come 
up and claim to join it on giving security that he could pay for the 
portion desired. In Berwick, a man who bought a lot of herrings 
must share them at cost price with the gildsmen present, and any 
one not present could have his share on paying the price and 
twelvepence to the buyer for profit. 

The jurisdiction of the gild, of course, had for its chief purposes 
the maintenance of the society's privileges. There are frequent 
ordinances against acting as agent for the sale of goods belonging 






The Mediaeval Gilds 



J 75 



to non-members, or teaching or aiding a strange merchant to pur- 
chase to the injury of the gild. But an equally important object 
was the maintenance of fair dealing and of a high standard of quality 
in the goods sold. The rolls contain numerous records of fines 
for dishonestly dyeing wool, for mixing bad wool with good for 
short weight, for selling at more than the assize or fixed price, as 
well as for the offence of forestalling, which we shall see later to 
have been so carefully guarded against. 

The brotherhood, moreover, was unlike a modern society aiming 
at some particular material advantage in that it entered into a 
great part of everyday life. Sick gildsmen were visited, and wine 
and food sent to them from the feasts; brethren who had fallen 
into poverty were relieved; their daughters were dowered for 
marriage or the convent; and when a member died his funeral 
was attended by the brethren and the due rites provided for. 

It was, as we have seen, in the second half of the eleventh cen- 
tury that merchant gilds began to come into existence ; during the 
twelfth century they arose in all considerable English towns. The 
rise of craft gilds is, roughly speaking, a century later; isolated 
examples occur early in the twelfth century, they become more 
numerous as the century advances, and in the thirteenth century 
they appear in all branches of manufacture and in every industrial 
centre. 

§ 5. The Crajt Gild and Its Relation to the Merchant Gild 

Craft gilds were associations of all the artisans engaged in a par- 
ticular industry in a particular town, for certain common purposes : 
what those purposes were will be seen later. Their appearance 
marks the second stage in the history of industry, the transition from 
the family system to the artisan (or gild) system. In the former 
there was no class of artisans properly so called ; no class, that is 
to say, of men whose time was entirely or chiefly devoted to a 
particular manufacture ; and this because all the needs of a family 
or other domestic group, whether of monastery or manor-house, 
were satisfied by the labors of the members of the group itself. 
The latter, on the contrary, is marked by the presence of a body of 
men each of whom was occupied more or less completely in one 
particular manufacture. The very growth from the one to the 
other system, therefore, is an example of "division of labor," or, 
to use a better phrase, of "division of employments." If, like 
Adam Smith, we attempted to determine "the natural progress of 



ij6 English Historians 

opulence," we might formulate the law of development thus: In 
an agricultural community the first division of employments that 
will appear will be between the great bulk of the population who 
continue to be engaged in agriculture and that small number of 
persons who occupy themselves in transferring the surplus raw 
produce of one place to other places where there is need of it. 
When, however, as in the case of England, a country is surpassed 
by others in the arts, or is unable to furnish itself with articles of 
luxury, such as precious stones, dealers in such imported com- 
modities desired by the wealthier classes will appear even before 
there is a class of dealers in the raw produce of the country. But 
in any case the growth of a small merchant or trading class precedes 
that of a manufacturing class. . . . 

The relation of the craft gilds to the merchant gilds is a very 
difficult question. In many of the towns of Germany and the 
Netherlands a desperate struggle took place during the thirteenth 
and fourteenth centuries between a burgher oligarchy, who monop- 
olized the municipal government, and were still further strength- 
ened in many cases by union in a merchant gild, and the artisans 
organized in their craft gilds, the craftsmen fighting first for the 
right of having gilds of their own, and then for a share in the gov- 
ernment of the town. These facts have been easily fitted into 
a symmetrical theory of industrial development; the merchant 
gilds, it is said, were first formed for protection against feudal 
lords, but became exclusive, and so rendered necessary the for- 
mation of craft gilds ; and in the same way the craft gilds became 
exclusive afterwards, and the journeymen were compelled to form 
societies of their own for protection against the masters. It was 
not difficult to explain the much scantier notices as to English 
affairs by the light of this theory, and to make up for the silence of 
English chroniclers by foreign analogies. 

The very neatness of such a theory, and the readiness with which 
it has been accepted by popular writers in spite of the paucity of 
English evidence, have perhaps led some historians to treat it with 
scant consideration. It is urged that there is no evidence of any 
such contest in this country between burghers and artisans. It is 
further maintained that the craft gilds had but little independence, 
and are to be regarded as merely the machinery by which mu- 
nicipal authorities supervised manufacture. Yet this view does not 
seem satisfactory in view of the information which has been lately 
brought to light with regard to the merchant gild. The following 
theory as to the relations of the various bodies cannot be regarded 



The Mediaeval Gilds 177 

as more than a theory ; but it does not seem to be in collision with 
facts, and it is confirmed by much indirect evidence. 

Membership of the town assembly, the court leet, or portmanmote 
seems to have been originally bound up with the possession of 
land within the town boundaries, and it was the right to appear in 
such an assembly that must originally have made a man a burgess 
or citizen. Of such burgesses the merchant gild of each town 
was constituted. At first the term merchant, or trader, would 
cover all those who had occasion to sell or buy anything beyond 
provisions for daily use ; and the holder of a plot of land, however 
small, who was also a craftsman, would not be excluded. But 
this harmonious union must have been disturbed in two ways. 
There came into existence a class of landless inhabitants of the 
towns, owing probably in the main to the natural increase of 
the town population itself, but also perhaps partly to some influx 
of serfs from the country districts. These landless inhabitants 
could not be regarded as burgesses at all, and therefore could not 
be admitted into the merchant gild, even if they had desired, and 
had been able to pay the entrance money. Many of them would 
become servants to the richer citizens, but some would turn to 
handicrafts. And, secondly, although in a small town, such as 
Totnes, the traders' gild might long continue to include craftsmen, 
in the larger towns there would be a tendency for the management 
of the gild to fall entirely into the hands of "merchants" in the 
modern sense of the word, until at last they could venture to 
impose and enforce the rule that before admission to the gild an 
artisan must abjure his craft. But by this time the merchant gild, 
whose members must have from the first exercised a predominant 
influence in the town, had become practically identical with the 
governing body; or, rather, a municipal organization had come 
into existence which combined the rights of jurisdiction of the 
court leet with the rights of trade of the merchant gild. Thus 
two distinct issues were raised : were the craftsmen to obtain for 
their gilds right. of supervision and jurisdiction over their members, 
apart from and independent of the powers of the municipal author- 
ities ? and were they to continue to submit to the trading monopoly 
of the gild merchant? 

§ 6. The Early Craft Gilds and their Control 

The first craft gilds that come into notice are those of the weavers 
and fullers of woollen cloth. It was the weavers' gild, all over 

N 



178 English Historians 

Western Europe, that began and led the struggle against the old 
governing bodies. The reason is obvious: the manufacture of 
materials for clothing was the first industry in which a wide demand 
would make it worth while for men to entirely devote themselves 
to it, and therefore it was the first in which a special body of crafts- 
men appeared. Gilds of bakers, indeed, are to be found almost 
as early ; but so much less skill is required in baking than in weav- 
ing, that it long remained, as it still does to a great degree, a fam- 
ily employment. Hence bakers could never be so numerous as 
weavers ; and as the former manufactured for immediate consump- 
tion, they scarcely came into conflict with the trading monopoly 
of the merchants. 

We owe to the chance existence of the Pipe Roll for 1130 the 
knowledge that in that year there were gilds of weavers in London, 
Lincoln, and Oxford, making' annual payment to the king in 
return for his authorization of their existence ; the weavers of Ox- 
ford, referring in the reign of Edward I to the time when the pay- 
ment was fixed, declared that their gild then contained sixty mem- 
bers. In the same reign there was also a gild of corvesars, or 
leather-dressers, in Oxford. During the early years of Henry II 
gilds of weavers are also found at York, Winchester, Huntingdon, 
and Nottingham, and a gild of fullers at Winchester, each making 
annual payments to the Exchequer. The annual payment was 
not merely a tax; it was the condition upon which they received 
the sanction of the government. Gilds that the king had not 
authorized were amerced as ''adulterine," as was the case in 1180 
in London with the gilds of goldsmiths, butchers, pepperers, and 
cloth-finishers. But there seems to have been no attempt to 
forcibly dissolve the adulterine societies; they were not large 
enough to arouse the jealousy of the London burgesses, and every 
one of them survived to take its place among the later companies. 

The only definite provision besides a general confirmation of 
"liberties and customs" in the earliest charters — such as those 
granted to the weavers of London and York by Henry II — was 
that no one within the town (sometimes the district) should fol- 
low the craft unless he belonged to the gild. The right to force 
all other craftsmen to join the organization — Znnft-zwang, as 
German writers call it — carried with it the right to impose con- 
ditions, to exercise some sort of supervision over those who joined. 
It was natural that the earliest gilds, growing up with a certain 
antagonism to the burgesses, should seek to make their jurisdiction 
as wide as possible. But such an independent authority would 



The Mediaeval Gilds 179 

intensify the jealousy of the governing bodies in the towns. The 
length to which the antagonism between the burghers and arti- 
sans might go is clearly illustrated in London. We do not know 
whether there had ever been a gild merchant in London; how- 
ever, in 1 191, by the recognition of its "commune" the citizens 
obtained complete municipal self-government, and consequently 
the recognition of the same rights over trade and industry as a gild 
merchant would have exercised. Almost immediately they offered 
to make an annual payment to the Exchequer if the weavers' gild 
were abolished. John accepted the offer, and in 1200 the gild 
was abolished by royal charter. For some reason or other it was 
again restored in two or three years; but long afterwards the 
weavers did not feel themselves out of danger. 

§ 7. Struggle of the Craftsmen for Privileges 

In other towns it is the economic struggle that is most clearly 
discernible. We have seen that the charters. to towns granting 
permission to have a merchant gild usually contained a clause to 
the effect that none but the members of that society were to engage 
in trade, and that it is expressly stated in one case that they are to 
have the monopoly even of the retail sale of cloth. There is reason 
to believe that this was a monopoly very generally insisted upon. 
The London Book of Customs contains certain entries entitled 
the "Laws" of the weavers and fullers of Winchester, Oxford, 
Beverley, and Marlborough — reports or copies which the London 
magistrates must have obtained sometime in the thirteenth century 
to strengthen their cause. These "laws" draw a sharp distinction 
between the craftsman and the freeman, franke homme, of the 
town. No freeman could be accused by a weaver or a fuller, nor 
could an artisan even give evidence against one. If a craftsman 
'became so rich that he wished to become a freeman, he must first 
forswear his craft and get rid of all his tools from his house. No 
weaver or fuller might go outside the town to sell his own cloth 
and so interfere with the monopoly of the merchants; nor was he 
allowed to sell his cloth to any save a merchant of the town. In- 
deed, he must get the consent of the "good men " of the town before 
he could even carry on his craft ; and he was not to work for any 
but the good men of the town. This last rule reappears in an order 
of the gild merchant of Leicester as late as 1265, prohibiting the 
craftsmen of the town from weaving for the men of other places so 
long as they had sufficient work to do for the burgesses of Leicester. 



180 English Historians 

The materials are not yet accessible which would allow us to 
trace the way in which the old organization of the burgesses lost 
its exclusive rights ; or, what is perhaps only the other side of the 
same change, the way in which the craftsmen gained the rights of 
burgesses. The trading monopoly was lost, probably, before the 
end of the thirteenth century. It is at any rate evident that the 
statute of 1335 allowing foreign merchants to trade freely in Eng- 
land is framed in such terms as to clearly include English craftsmen 
in the permission it gives, and that it must have had the effect of 
weakening any monopoly which the governing class in any of the 
towns might still claim. . . . With the loss of their trading monop- 
oly disappeared the raison d'etre of the gilds merchant, and with 
it of the gilds themselves as separate organizations. In many 
towns the name long survived, but only as a term to describe cer- 
tain functions of the municipal authorities, especially the admission 
of apprentices to the freedom of the city. In others the gild re- 
organized itself in the shape of a social and religious society ; while 
in one or two it is possible that the later company of merchant 
adventurers grew out of the gild merchant. . . . 

§ 8. The Growth of the Craft Gilds 

At the end of the reign of Edward III there were in London 
forty-eight companies of crafts, each with a separate organization 
and officers of its own, a number which had increased to at least 
sixty before the close of the century. Other important towns 
must have seen a like increase in the number of artisans and a like 
formation of companies, though subdivision did not go so far. In 
towns of the second rank, such as Exeter, the development is 
later and occupies the following century; while in the smaller 
towns companies were only formed when there was a considerable 
body of men employed in the same craft, so -that many artisans 
remained unbound by any such organization and subject only to 
the regulations imposed by statute, or by the mayor or bailiff. 

We are able roughly to determine the period at which the forma- 
tion of companies instead of being opposed began to be forwarded 
by the municipal authorities. Until the reign of Edward I, seem- 
ingly, craft gilds had arisen spontaneously for the mutual help 
and advantage of the craftsmen : they had been obliged to make 
annual payments to the king or other lords to secure recognition, 
and they had found it difficult to maintain their rights against the 
municipal authorities. The reign of Edward I appears to mark 



The Mediaeval Gilds 181 

the turning-point in their history. He saw that they might be a 
useful counterpoise to the power of the governing bodies in the 
towns and therefore exerted his influence on their side. On the 
other hand, the establishment of a strong central authority made 
it less necessary and less possible for the newly rising gilds to 
obtain such extensive rights of jurisdiction as the Zunjte in Ger- 
many or the weavers' gild in London in the previous century. 
Accordingly, we see a new policy in the craft ordinances, which 
from the reign of Edward II have been preserved in such numbers. 
The gild system no longer was merely tolerated; it was fostered 
and extended, though doubtless primarily for police purposes, — 
to insure due supervision of the craft and the punishment of of- 
fenders against regulations, through persons chosen by the craft 
but responsible to the municipal authorities. Up to this time the 
gilds had been few in number, because there had been few artisans, 
and only such as were engaged in meeting most elementary wants, 
food and clothing, such namely as bakers, butchers, leather- 
dressers — above all those engaged in the manufacture of cloth, 
weavers, fullers, and dyers. 

But now a rapid increase in the number of artisans takes place ; 
new wants begin to be felt, and each new want is supplied by a 
separate body of craftsmen. Consequently we find the municipal 
authorities confirming or creating companies, not only of such 
wholesale dealers as grocers and drapers, but also of such artisans 
as spurriers, helmet makers, brace makers, farriers, wax-chandlers, 
scriveners, and piemakers. It is often not easy to determine 
whether the ordinances which first mention these companies 
actually created them. In many cases probably they had come 
into existence spontaneously somewhat before the date of the 
ordinances "accepted by the mayor and aldermen at the suit and 
request of the folk of the trade." But in many cases also the 
organization was imposed from without by municipal rulers. . . . 

§ 9. Internal Organization of the Craft Gild 

The internal organization of the craft gilds can be briefly de- 
scribed. The most important part of it was the authority of the 
wardens, overseers, bailiffs, or masters, whose chief duty was to 
supervise the industry and cause offenders to be punished. They 
were elected annually at full assemblies of the men of the craft, 
absence from which was punished by fine ; and it was at such or 
similar gatherings that from time to time new regulations were 



1 82 English Historians 

drawn up to be submitted to the approval of the mayor and alder- 
men. No one could work at the craft who had not been approved 
and admitted to the gild by its officials ; and it would seem that 
in London, from the middle of the fourteenth century, admission 
to the freedom of the city and to a craft took place at one and the 
same time. 

In the early part of the fourteenth century, apprenticeship was 
only gradually becoming an absolutely necessary preliminary to 
setting up as a master ; to the same period is due the fixing of the 
term of apprenticeship at seven years. A separate class of jour- 
ney-men was also only just coming into existence. It was still, 
apparently, the usual practice for a man, on coming out of his ap- 
prenticeship, to set up for himself. Such "serving-men" as there 
were, made contracts with master-craftsmen to work for them for a 
certain term, sometimes for a period of several years. But from 
the frequency with which the rule is repeated, that u no one shall 
receive the apprentice, serving-man, or journeyman of another in 
the same trade during the term agreed upon between his master 
and him," and the frequency also with which the mayor of one 
town has to write to the mayor of another to ask that runaways 
should be sent back, it appears that apprentices often became 
discontented, and absconded. The gild ordinances imply that, as 
a rule, only master-craftsmen took part in the government of the 
fraternity, but there is at least one case where ordinances are 
described as agreed to "as well by serving-men as masters." It 
does not appear that as yet the number either of journeymen or of 
apprentices that one master could take was limited by legislation 
or ordinance ; but we shall see later that the limitation of number 
in the sixteenth century was in order to maintain an existing state 
of things, so that it is probable that at this time a master artisan 
would not usually have more than one or two journeymen and 
one or two apprentices. 

The regulations drawn up by the crafts aimed at the prevention 
of fraud, and the observance of certain standards of size and 
quality in the wares produced. Articles made in violation of 
these rules were called "false," just as clipped or counterfeit 
coin was "false money." For such "false work " the makers were 
punished by fine (one-half going to the craft, the other half to the 
town funds), and, upon the third or fourth offence, by expulsion 
from the trade. Penalties were provided, as far as possible, for 
every sort of deceitful device: such as putting better wares on the 
top of a bale than below, moistening groceries so as to make them 



The Mediaeval Gilds 183 

heavier, selling second-hand furs for new, soldering together broken 
swords, selling sheep leather for doe leather, and many other like 
tricks. It was for the same reason that night work was forbidden; 
not, as Brentano says, with the philanthropic object of providing 
work for all, but because work could not be done so neatly at 
night, and because craftsmen, knowing they were not likely to be 
visited at that time by the wardens, took the opportunity to make 
wares " falsely," or because working at night disturbed the neigh- 
bors. It seems, however, to have been a general rule, that men 
should not work after six o'clock on Saturday evening, or on eves 
of double feasts. There is, indeed, one regulation which does 
seem designed to insure men's having work, and that is, that 
"no one shall set any woman to work, other than his wedded wife 
or his daughter." 

It is certain, from the analogy of the gilds merchant, as well 
as from what we know of the later usages of the companies and of 
the practices of similar bodies abroad, that in each of the craft 
gilds, besides regulations as to manufacture, there were rules pro- 
viding for mutual assistance in difficulties, for meetings, festivities, 
and common worship. But the documents which would throw 
light on the subject have not yet been published. The craft 
statutes contained in the archives of the corporation of London 
deal almost exclusively with the regulation of processes; and 
this is easy to explain, for only the action of the gilds in the super- 
vision of industry would fall beneath the view of the city authori- 
ties; with their internal life as friendly societies the corporation 
had nothing to do. Fortunately one set of ordinances therein con- 
tained, those of the white-tawyers or leather-dressers, in 1346, are 
more detailed, and from these we may conjecture similar customs 
in other crafts. They have a common-box for subscriptions; out 
of this sevenpence a week is paid to any man of the trade who has 
fallen into poverty from old age or inability to work, and sevenpence 
a week likewise to a poor man's widow, so long as she remains 
unmarried. "If any one of the said craft shall depart this life, 
and have not wherewithal to be buried, he shall be buried at the 
expense of the common-box ; and when any one of the said trade 
shall die, all those of the said trade shall go to the vigil and make 
offerings on the morrow." Some of the companies, as we learn 
later, had chantries and side chapels in parish churches, and 
solemn services at intervals. The white-tawyers are only able to 
afford "a wax candle to burn before Our Lady in the Church of 
All Hallows near London Wall." And there is one clause which 



184 English Historians 

clearly displays the effort after fraternal union : it is one ordaining 
that "those of the trade" shall aid a member who cannot finish 
work he has undertaken, "so that the said work be not lost." 

Bibliographical Note 

Gross, The Gild Merchant. Hibbert, Influence and Development of 
English Gilds (Cambridge Historical Essays). Seligman, Two Chapters on 
the Mediaeval Gilds of England. Cunningham, Growth of English Industry 
and Commerce 1906 edition, Vol. I, consult Table of Contents. Smith, T. J., 
English Gilds (Early English Text Society), valuable for original gild or- 
dinances. Kramer, The English Craft Gilds and the Government. Transla- 
tions and Reprints, Vol. II, No. 2, for an excellent collection of illustrative 
materials 



CHAPTER III 

TOWN LIFE IN THE MIDDLE AGES 

In the examination of the manor and the gild, the student gets 
a clear view of the life of the people of the Middle Ages so far as 
their economic activities were concerned, and these occupy a great 
part of the time and thought of the people in all ages. The medi- 
aeval town, however, was far more than the gild, and it enjoyed a 
political independence and self-sufficiency which were afterwards 
overshadowed by the growing authority and activity of the national 
government. In view of the recent developments in municipal 
affairs it is interesting to read the description of mediaeval town 
life which is to be found in Mrs. J. R. Green's volumes on that 
subject. 

§ i. Provisions for Municipal Defence l 

The inhabitants of a mediaeval borough were subject to a 
discipline as severe as that of a military state of modern times. 
Threatened by enemies on every side, constantly surrounded by 
perils, they had themselves to bear the whole charges of fortification 
and defence. If a French fleet appeared on the coast, if Welsh or 
Scotch armies made a raid across the frontier, if civil war broke out 
and opposing forces marched across the country, every town had 
to look to its own safety. The inhabitants served under a system 
of universal conscription. At the muster-at-arms held twice a year 
poor and rich appeared in military array with such weapons as they 
could bring forth for the king's service : the poor marching with 
knife or dagger or hatchet; the prosperous burghers, bound ac- 
cording to mediaeval ideas to live "after their degree," displaying 
mail or wadded coats, bucklers, bows and arrows, swords, or even 
a gun. 

At any moment this armed population might be called out to 

1 Mrs. J. R. Green, Town Life in the Fifteenth Century, Vol. I, pp. 127 fT. 
By permission of Mrs. J. R. Green and The Macmillan Company, Pub- 
lishers. 

185 



1 86 English Historians 

active service. " Concerning our bell," say the citizens of Here- 
ford, "we use to have it in a public place where our chief bailiff 
may come, as well by day as by night, to give warning to all men 
living within the said city and suburbs. And we do not say that 
it ought to ring unless it be for some terrible fire burning any row 
of houses within the said city, or for any common contention where- 
by the city might be terribly moved, or for any enemies drawing 
near unto the city, or if the city shall be besieged, or any sedition 
shall be between any, and notice thereof given by any unto our 
chief bailiff. And in these cases aforesaid, and in all like cases, all 
manner of men abiding within the city and suburbs and liberties 
of the city, of what degree soever they be of, ought to come at any 
such ringing, or motion of ringing, with such weapons as fit their 
degree." 

At the first warning of an enemy's approach the mayor or bailiff 
became supreme military commander. It was his office to see 
that the panic-stricken people of the suburbs were gathered within 
the walls and given house and food; that all meat and drink and 
chattels were made over for the public service, and all armor 
likewise carried to the Town Hall ; that every inhabitant or refugee 
paid the taxes required for the cost of his protection ; that all strong 
and able men "which doth dwell in the city or would be assisted 
by the city in anything" watched by day and night, and that 
women and clerics who could not watch themselves found at their 
own charge substitutes "of the ablest of the city." 

If frontier towns had periods of comparative quiet, the seaports, 
threatened by sea as by land, lived in perpetual alarm, at least so 
long as the Hundred Years' War protracted its terrors. When 
the inhabitants had built ships to guard the harbor, and provided 
money for their victualling and the salaries of the crew, they were 
called out to repair towers and carry cartloads of rocks or stones to 
be laid on the walls "for defending the town in resisting the king's 
enemies." Guns had to be carried to the Church or the Common 
House on sleds or laid in pits at the town gates, and gunstones, 
saltpetre, and pellet powder bought. For weeks together watch- 
men were posted in the church towers with horns to give warning 
if a foe appeared ; and piles of straw, reeds, and wood were heaped 
up on the seacoast to kindle beacons and watch-fires. Even if the 
townsfolk gathered for a day's amusement to hear a play in the 
Courthouse, a watch was set lest the enemy should set fire to their 
streets — a calamity but too well known to the burghers of Rye 
and Southampton. 



Town Life in the Middle Ages 187 

Inland towns were in little better case. Civil war, local rebel- 
lion, attacks from some neighboring lord, outbreaks among the 
followers of a great noble lodged within their walls at the head of an 
army of retainers, all the recurring incidents of siege and pitched 
battle rudely reminded inoffensive shopkeepers and artisans of 
their military calling. Owing to causes but little studied, local 
conflicts were frequent, and they were fought out with violence and 
determination. At the close of the fourteenth century a certain 
knight, Baldwin of Radington, with the help of John of Stanley, 
raised eight hundred fighting men "to destroy and hurt the com- 
mons of Chester " ; and these stalwart warriors broke into the 
abbey, seized the wine and dashed the furniture in pieces, and 
when the mayor and sheriff came to the rescue nearly killed the 
sheriff. When, in 1441, the Archbishop of York determined to 
fight for his privileges in Ripon Fair, he engaged two hundred 
men-at-arms from Scotland and the Marches at sixpence, or a 
shilling a day, while a Yorkshire gentleman, Sir John Plumpton, 
gathered seven hundred men, and at the battle that ensued more 
than a thousand arrows were discharged by them. 

Within the town territory.the burghers had to serve at their own 
cost and charges ; but when the king called out their forces to join 
his army, the municipal officers had to get the contingent ready to 
provide their dress or badges, to appoint the captain, and to gather 
in money from the various parishes for the soldiers' pay, "or else 
the constables to be set in prison to abide such time as it be content 
and paid." When they were sent to a distance their fellow-towns- 
men brought provisions of salt fish and paniers or bread boxes for 
the carriage of their food, and reluctantly provided a scanty wage, 
which was yet more reluctantly doled out to the soldier by his 
officer, and perhaps never reached his pocket at all. Universal 
conscription proved then as now the great inculcator of peace. 
To the burgher called from the loom and the dyeing pit and the 
market stall to take down his bow or dagger, war was a hard and 
ungrateful service where reward and plunder were dealt out with 
a niggardly hand ; and men conceived a deep hatred of strife and 
disorder of which they had measured all the misery. W T hen the 
common people dreamed of a brighter future, their simple hope 
was that every maker of deadly weapons should die by his own 
tools; for in that better time — 

" Battles shall never eft (again) be, ne man bear edge-tool, 
And if any man (smithy) it, be smit therewith to death." 



1 88 English Historians 



§ 2. Mediceval Police 

Nor even in times of peace might the burghers lay aside their 
arms, for trouble was never far from their streets. Every inhab- 
itant was bound to have his dagger or knife or Irish "skene," in 
case he was called out to the king's muster or to aid in keeping the 
king's peace. But daggers which were effective in keeping the 
peace were equally effective in breaking it, and the town records 
are full of tales of brawls and riots, of frays begun by "railing with 
words out of reason," or by "plucking a man down by the hair of 
his head," but which always ended in the appearance of a short 
dagger, "and so drew blood upon each other." For the safety 
of the community — a safety which was the recognized charge 
of every member of these simple democratic states — each house- 
holder was bound to take his turn in keeping nightly watch and 
ward in the streets. It is true, indeed, that reluctant citizens con- 
stantly by one excuse or another sought to escape a painful and 
thankless duty : whether it was whole groups of inhabitants shel- 
tering themselves behind legal pretexts, or sturdy rebels breathing 
out frank defiance of the town authorities. 

Thus in Aylesbury, according to the constable's report, one 
"Reygg kept a house all the year till the watch time came. And 
when he was summoned to the watch then came Edward Chalkyll 
' f asesying ' and said he should not watch for no man and thus bare 
him up, and that caused the other be the bolder for to bar the 
king's watch. . . . He saith and threateneth us with his mas- 
ter," add the constables, "and thus we be over 'crakyd' that we 
dare not go, for when they be 'may ten ' they be the bolder." John 
Bossey "said the same wise that he would not watch for us," and 
three others "lacked each of them a night." But in such cases the 
mayor's authority was firmly upheld by the whole community, 
every burgher knowing well that if any inhabitant shirked his duty 
a double burden fell upon the shoulder of his neighbor. 

§ 3. Preservation of Municipal Boundaries 

All inhabitants of a borough were also deeply interested in the 
preservation of the boundaries which marked the extent of their 
dominions, the "liberties" within which they could enforce their 
own law, regulate trade, and raise taxes. Century after century 
the defence of the frontier remained one of the urgent questions of 
town politics, insistent, perpetually recurring, now with craft and 



Town Life in the Middle Ages 189 

treachery, now with violence and heated passion breaking into 
sudden flame. Every year the mayor and corporation made a 
perambulation of the bounds and inspected the landmarks; the 
common treasure was readily poured out if lawsuits and bribes 
were needed to ascertain and preserve the town's rights; and if 
law failed, the burghers fell back without hesitation on personal 
force. 

In Canterbury the town and the convent of Christ Church were 
at open war about this question as about many others. The monks 
remained unconvinced even though the mayor and council of thirty- 
six periodically "walked the bounds," giving copper coins at the 
various turning points to "divers children," that they might re- 
member the limits of the franchise, while they themselves were 
refreshed after their trouble by a "potation" in a field near Ford- 
wich. At one time the quarrel as to the frontier raged round a 
gigantic ash tree, — the old landmark where the liberties of the 
city touched those of Fordwich, — which was in 1499 treacherously 
cut down by the partisans of Christ Church ; the Canterbury men 
with the usual feastings and a solemn libation of wine set up a new 
boundary stone. At another time the dispute shifted to where 
at the west gate of the town the river wound with uncertain and 
changing course that left frontiers vague and undefined. A low 
marshy ground called the "Rosiers" was claimed by the mayor as 
under his jurisdiction, while the prior asserted that it was within 
the county of Kent, and for thirty years the question was fought 
out in the law courts. On July 16, 1500, the mayor definitely 
asserted his pretensions by gathering two hundred followers 
arrayed in manner of war to march out to the Rosiers. There 
certain monks and servants of the prior were taking the air : one 
protested he had been "late afore sore sick and was walking in the 
field for his recreation"; another had a sparrow-hawk on his fist, 
and the servants declared they were but peaceful haymakers ; but 
all had apparently gone out ready for every emergency, for at the 
appearance of the enemy bows and arrows, daggers, bills, and 
brigandiers were produced from under the monks' frocks and the 
smocks of the haymakers. In the battle that followed the monks 
were beaten, and the citizens cut down willows and stocked up 
the dike made in the river by the convent, and boldly proceeded 
the next day to other outrages. The matter was brought to judg- 
ment and a verdict given against the mayor for riot — a verdict 
which that official, however, lightly disregarded. It was in vain 
that the prior, wealthy and powerful as he was, and accustomed to 



190 English Historians 

so great influence at court, appealed to the Star Chamber to have 
the penalty enforced, for no further steps were taken by the gov- 
ernment. It probably judged wisely, since in such a matter the 
temper of the citizens ran high; and the rectification of frontiers 
was resented as stoutly as a new delimitation of kingdoms and 
empires to-day. 

§ 4. Municipal Lands 

Resolution in the defence of their territory was no doubt quick- 
ened by the sense which every burgess shared of common prop- 
erty in the borough. The value of woodland and field and meadow 
which made up the "common lands " was well understood by the 
freeman who sent out his sheep or cows to their allotted pasture, 
or who opened the door of his yard in the early morning when the 
common herd went round the streets to collect the swine and drive 
them out on the moor till evening. The men of Romney did not 
count grudgingly their constant labor and cost in measuring and 
levelling and draining the swamps belonging to their town and 
protecting them from the encroachments of "the men of the 
marsh" beyond, for the sake of winning grazing lands for their 
sheep, and of securing a "cow-pull" of swans or cygnets for their 
lord the archbishop when it was desirable "to have his friendship." 

In poor struggling boroughs like Preston, in large and wealthy 
communities like Nottingham, in manufacturing towns like 
Worcester with its busy population of weavers, in rich capitals like 
York, in trading ports like Southampton where the burghers had 
almost forgotten the free traditions of popular government, the 
inhabitants never relaxed their vigilance as to the protection of 
their common property. They assembled year after year to make 
sure that there had been no diminishing of their rights or alienation 
of their land, or that in the periodical allotments the best fields 
and closes had not fallen to the share of aldermen and councillors ; 
and by elaborate constitutional checks, or if these failed, by 
"riotous assembly and insurrection," they denounced every 
attempt at encroachment on marsh or pasture. 

§ 5. Municipal Property and Finance 

So also in the case of other property which corporations held 
for the good of the community — fisheries, warrens, salt-pits, 
pastures reclaimed from the sea, plots of ground saved in the dry 



Town Life in the Middle Ages 191 

bed of a river, building sites and all waste places within the town 
walls, warehouses and shops and tenements, inns and mills, the 
grassy slopes of the city ditch which were let for grazing, the 
towers of the city walls leased for dwelling houses or store-rooms, 
any property bequeathed to the community for maintaining the 
poor or repairing the walls or paying tolls and taxes — all this cor- 
porate wealth which lightened the burdens of the taxpayer was a 
matter of concern to every citizen. The people were themselves 
joint guardians of the town treasure. Representatives chosen 
by the burghers kept one or two of the keys of the common chest, 
which could only be opened therefore with their consent. 

Year after year mayor or treasurers were by the town ordinances 
required to present their accounts before the assembly of all the 
people "in our whole community, by the tolling of the common 
bell calling them together for that intent " — an assembly that 
perhaps gathered in the parish church in which seats were set up 
for the occasion at the public expense. There the people heard 
the lists of fines levied in the courts; of tolls in the market, or 
taxes taken at the gates or in the harbor; of the "maltodes," or 
sums paid on commodities for sale; of the "scot" levied on the 
property of individuals ; of the "lyvelode " or livelihood, an income 
tax on rates or profits earned. They learned what means the 
corporation had taken of increasing the common revenue ; whether 
it had ordered a "church-ale," or an exhibition of dancing girls, 
or a play of Robin Hood; what poor relief had been given in the 
past year ; what public loans with judicious usury of Over ten per 
cent it had allowed, as when in Lydd "the jurats one year lent 
Thomas Dygon five marks from the common purse when going to 
the North Sea, and he repaid the same well and trustily and paid 
an increase thereon seven shillings " ; or they were told whether the 
town council proposed to do a little trading for the good of the 
community; and how a "common barge" had been built with 
timber bought at one town, cables and anchors at another, pitch 
and canvas at a third ; and how, when the ship was finished, the 
corporation paid for a modest supply of "bread and ale the day the 
mast was set in the barge," before it was sent out to fish for herrings 
or to speculate in a cargo of salt or wine, for the profit of the public 
treasury. 

Lessons in common financial responsibility had been early 
forced on the burghers everywhere by the legal doctrine that the 
whole body might be held responsible for the debt of one of its 
members, while each member on his part was answerable for the 



192 English Historians 

faults of his fellows, whether singly or collectively. Thus when 
Norwich failed in paying debts due to the king in 1286, the sheriff 
of Norfolk was ordered to enter the liberty and distrain twelve 
of the richer and more discreet persons of the community; and 
when the rent of Southampton was in arrears, one of its burgesses 
was thrown into the Fleet in London. Under such a system as this 
the ordinary interest of citizens in questions of taxation and ex- 
penditure was greatly quickened. The municipalities were stern 
creditors. If a man did not pay his rent for the king's ferm, the 
doors and windows of his house were taken off, every one in it 
turned out, and the house stood empty for a year and a day, or even 
longer, before the doors might be redeemed in full court, or before it 
passed to the next heir. But it was probably rather owing to the 
happy circumstances of the English towns than to the vigilance of 
the burghers that there is no case in England of a disaster which 
was but too common in France — the disaster of a borough fall- 
ing into bankruptcy, and through bankruptcy into servitude and 
political ruin. 

§ 6. Municipal Improvements 

In the town communities of the Middle Ages all public works 
were carried out by what was in fact forced labor of the whole 
commonalty. If the boroughs suffered little from government 
interference, neither could they look for help in the way of state 
aid or state loans; and as the burgher's purse in early days was 
generally empty, he had to give of the work of his hands for the 
common good. In Nottingham, ' ' booners " — that is, the burgesses 
themselves or substitutes whom they provided to take their place — 
repaired the highways and kept the streets in order. The great 
trench dug at Bristol to alter the course of the Frome was made 
"by the manoeuvre of all the commonalty as well of Redcliffe 
ward as of the town of Bristol." When Hythe in 141 2 sent for a 
Dutch engineer to make a new harbor, all the inhabitants were 
called out in turn to help at the "Delveys" or diggings. Sundays 
and week days alike the townsmen had to work, dining off bread 
and ale provided by the corporation for the diggers, and if they 
failed to appear they were fined fourpence a day. In the same way 
Sandwich engaged a Hollander to superintend the making of a new 
dike for the harbor; the mayor was ordered to find three work- 
men to labor at it, every jurat two, and each member of the com- 
mon council one man; while all other townsmen had to give 
labor or find substitutes according to their ability. The jurats 



Town Life in the Middle Ages 103 

were made overseers, and were responsible for the carrying out of 
the work, and so successfully was the whole matter managed that 
in 151 2 the Sandwich haven was able to give shelter to five hun- 
dred or six hundred hoys. 



§ 7. Appeals to Public Charity 

Forced labor such as this could, of course, only be applied to 
works where skilled artificers were not necessary; but occasions 
soon multiplied when the town mob had to be replaced by trained 
laborers, and we already see traces of a transitional system in the 
making of the Hythe harbor, where the municipality had to 
engage hired labor for such work as could not be done by the 
burgesses. But undertakings for which scientific skill was needed 
sorely taxed local resources, and the burghers were driven to 
make anxious appeals to public charity. In 1447, when Bridport 
wanted to improve its harbor, collectors were sent all over the 
country to beg for money; indulgences of forty or a hundred 
days were promised to subscribers by archbishops and bishops; 
and a copy of the paper carried by one of the collectors gives the 
sum of the masses said for them in the year as amounting to nearly 
four thousand : "the sum of all other good prayers no man know- 
eth save only God alone." The building and repairing of bridges 
as being also work that demanded science and skilled labor in- 
volved serious cost. When the king had allowed the bridge at 
Nottingham ^o fall into the river, he generously transferred its 
ownership and the duty of setting it up again to the townspeople, 
who appointed wardens and kept elaborate accounts and bore 
grievous anxiety, till finding its charges worse than all their ordi- 
nary town expenses they at last fell to begging also. So also the 
mayor of Exeter prayed for help in the matter of the bridge there, 
which had been built by a wealthy mayor and was "of the length 
or nigh by, and of the same mason work as London Bridge, hous- 
ing upon except ; the which bridge openly is known the greatest 
costly work and most of alms-deeds to help it in all the west part 
of England." Such instances reveal to us the persistent difficul- 
ties that beset a world where primitive methods utterly failed to 
meet new exigencies, and where the demand for technical quality 
in work was beginning to lead to new organizations of labor. 
Meanwhile the burghers had to fight their own way with no hope 
of grants in aid from the state, and little to depend on save the 
personal effort of the w^hole commonalty. 



194 English Historians 

§ 8. Medieval Municipal Gaieties 

The townspeople all took their part not only in the serious and 
responsible duties of town life, but apparently in an incessant 
round of gaieties as well. All the commons shared in supporting 
the minstrels and players of the borough. The ''waits " (so called 
from the French word guet) were originally and still partly re- 
mained watchmen of the town ; but it was in their character of 
minstrels, "who go every morning about the town piping," that 
they were paid by pence collected by the wardmen from every 
house. Every town, moreover, had its particular play, which was 
acted in the Town Hall, or the churchyard, before the mayor 
and his brethren sitting in state, while the whole town kept holi- 
day. In 141 1 there was a great play, From the Beginning of the 
World, at the Skinner's Well in London, "that lasted seven days 
continually, and there were the most part of the lords and gentles 
of England." At Canterbury the chief play was naturally The 
Martyrdom of St. Thomas. The cost is carefully entered in the 
municipal account books — charges for carts and wheels, floor- 
ing, hundreds of nails, a mitre, two bags of leather containing 
blood which was made to spout out at the murder, linen cloth for 
St. Thomas' clothes, tin foil and gold foil for the armor, pack- 
thread and glue, coal to melt the glue, alb and amys, knights' 
armor, the hire of a sword, the painting of St. Thomas' head, an 
angel which cost 2 2d. and flapped his wings as he turned every 
way on a hidden wynch with wheels oiled with soap. When all 
was over the properties of the pageant were put away in the barn 
at St. Sepulchre's Nunnery and kept safely till the next year at a 
charge of ibd. The Canterbury players also acted in the Three 
Kings of Cologne at the Town Hall, where the kings, attended by 
their henchmen, appeared decorated with strips of silver and gold 
paper and wearing monks' frocks. The three "beasts" for the 
Magi were made out of twelve ells of canvas distended with hoops 
and laths, and "painted after nature"; and there was a castle 
of painted canvas which cost 35. 4^. The artist and his helpers 
worked for six days and nights at these preparations and charged 
three shillings for their labor, food, fire, and candle. 

Minstrels and harpers and pipers and singers and play-actors, 
who stayed at home through the dark winter days "from the feast 
of All Saints to the feast of the Purification," to make music and 
diversion for their fellow-citizens, started off on their travels when 
the fine weather came, and journeyed from town to town giving 



Town Life in the Middle Ages 195 

their performances, and rewarded at the public expense with a 
gift of 6s. Sd. or 35. \d., and with dinner and wine "for the honor 
of the town." It was an easy life — 

" Some mirth to make as minstrels conneth (know), 
That will neither swynke (toil) nor sweat, but swear great oaths, 
And find up foul fantasies and fools them maken, 
And have wit at will to work if they would." 

Entries in the town accounts of Lydd give some idea of the con- 
stant visits of these wandering troops, and of the charges which 
they made upon the town treasure. Players from Romney came 
times without number, others from Rukinge, Wytesham, Heme, 
Hamme, Appledore, Stone, Folkestone, Rye; and besides these 
came the minstrels of the great lords, the king, the Duke 
of Somerset, the Duke of Buckingham, Lord De Bourchier, Lord 
Fiennes, the Earl of Warwick, the Duke of York, Lord Arundel, 
Lord Exeter, Lord Shrewsbury, the Earl of Pembroke, Lord 
Dacres, etc., all of whom doubtless the town dared not refuse 
to entertain, but "for love of their lords lythen (listen to) them at 
feasts." Besides this Lydd had its own special plays, The May 
and The Interlude of our Lord's Passion, and the whole town 
would gather on a Sunday to hear the actors, while watchmen 
were paid to keep guard on the shore against a surprise of the 
French. Its players seem to have set the fashion in the neighbor- 
hood; the Romney Corporation "chose wardens to have the play 
of Christ's Passion, as from olden time they were wont to have 
it," and paid the expenses of a man to go to Lydd "to see the 
original of our play there," besides giving the Lydd players a 
reward of 20s. for their performance. 

Other wanderers, too, knocked at the gates of Lydd — "the 
man with the dromedary," "a bear-ward," or the keeper of the 
king's lions travelling with his menagerie and demanding a sheep 
to be given to the lions ; archers and wrestlers from neighboring 
towns whom jurats and commons gathered to see, and supplied 
with wrestling collars and food for themselves and their horses, as 
well as a "rejvard" at the public expense. Besides bull-baiting, 
Lydd, doubtless like other towns, had its occasional "bear- 
baiting." There were the Christmas games and mumming, and 
the yearly visit of the "Boy Bishop" of St. Nicholas, who came 
from Romney to hold his feast at Lydd. And there was the uni- 
versal festival of the "watch" on St. John's eve, when Lydd paid 
out of its common chest for the candles kept burning all night 



i^6 English Historians 

in the Common House, and for the feast, not a trifling expense, 
if we may judge by the case of Bristol, where the crafts who took 
part in the watch divided among them ninety-four gallons of wine. 

This festival was observed everywhere, but other local feasts 
were arranged according to local traditions. In Canterbury every 
mayor was bound "to keep the watch" on the Eve of the Trans- 
lation of St. Thomas. "And in the aforesaid watch the sheriff 
to ride in harness with a henchman after him honestly emparelled 
for the honor of the same city. And the mayor to ride at his pleas- 
ure, and if the mayor's pleasure be to ride in harness, the aldermen 
to ride in like manner, and if he ride in his scarlet gown, the 
aldermen to ride after the same watch in scarlet and crimson 
gowns." The city was to be lighted by the mayor rinding "two 
cressets, or six torches, or more at his pleasure," every alderman 
finding two cressets, and each of the common council with every 
constable and town clerk one cresset. In Chester the great day 
for merry-making was Shrove Tuesday, when the drapers, saddlers, 
shoemakers, and many others met at the cross on the Roodeye, 
and there in the presence of the mayor the shoemakers gave to 
the drapers a football of leather "to play at from thence to the 
Common Hall." The saddlers at the same time gave "every 
master of them a painted ball of wood with flowers and arms upon 
the point of a spear, being goodly arrayed upon horseback accord- 
ingly." The whole town joined in the sports, and every one mar- 
ried within the year gave some contribution toward their funds. 

To these festivities we must add the yearly pageants of the 
gilds, whether of the great societies like the Gild of St. 
George of Norwich, whose alderman in scarlet robe followed by 
the four hundred members with their distinguishing red hoods, 
marched after the sword of wood with a dragon's head for the 
handle which had been presented to them by Henry the Fifth, 
or of the Corpus Christi Gild, which evidently played a political 
part in the life of every great town. In York it is said to have 
had in the sixteenth century nearly fifteen thousand members, 
and at its great pageant the mayor and town council "and other 
worshipful persons" joined in a common feast, and sent wine 
and fruits at the public expense to great nobles and ladies in the 
city, till perhaps supplies ran out and the town was "drunken 
dry." The craft gilds also, whether voluntarily or by order of 
the corporation, had their pageants acting the same play year 
after year. 

It has been commonly supposed that the English people had 



Town Life in the Middle Ages 197 

in the later Middle Ages a passion for pageantry and display which 
was one of the strongest forces in maintaining their gild organi- 
zation. But towards the end of the fifteenth century at least it 
becomes less and less clear that the free will of the craftsmen had 
much to say as to the maintenance of these public gaieties, or that 
they felt any enthusiasm for amusements which yearly grew more 
expensive and burdensome. There were places where the crafts, 
whether through poverty or economy, neglected to spend a due 
proportion of their earnings on the public festivals, and in one 
town after another as popular effort declined the authorities began 
to urge the people on to the better fulfilment of their duties. In 
1490 a complaint was made in Canterbury that the Corpus Christi 
Play, the City Watch on St. Thomas' Eve, and the Pageant of 
St. Thomas had fallen into decay. Some mayors, indeed, "in 
their year have full honorably kept the said watch"; but others 
had neglected it, and "all manner of harness within the city is 
decayed and rusted for lack of the yearly watch." It was there- 
fore decreed that every mayor should henceforth "keep the watch," 
and that the crafts who apparently hoped to escape from the 
heavy charges of these plays by declaring themselves too poor to 
be formed into a corporate body, should forthwith be grouped 
together into a sort of confederation or give up their bodies for 
punishment. 

In the same way when the tailors of Plymouth were incorporated 
in 1496, they had to bind themselves to provide a pageant every 
year on Corpus Christi Day for the benefit of the Corpus Christi 
Gild, and so on in many other towns. Occasionally, indeed, the 
corporation took a different and more merciful line; for the 
mayor and sheriffs of Norwich petitioned the lords and commons 
to pass an act or order to prevent players of interludes from 
coming into the city, as they took so large a share of the earnings 
of the poor operatives as to cause great want to their families 
and a heavy charge to the city, and Bridgenorth got an order from 
Elizabeth that the town might no longer pay players or bear- 
wards; whoever wanted to see such things, must see them "upon 
their own costs and charges." 

On the whole, it is evident that long before the Reformation, and 
even when as yet no Puritan principles had been imported into the 
matter, the gaiety of the towns was already sobered by the pressure 
of business and the increase of the class of depressed workers. 
It was not before the fanaticism of religion, but before the coming 
in of new forms of poverty and of bondage, that the old games and 



198 English Historians 

pageants lost their lustre and faded out of existence, save where a 
mockery of life was preserved to them by compulsion of the town 
authorities. And the town authorities were probably acting under 
pressure of the publicans and licensed victuallers. Cooks and 
brewers and hostellers were naturally deeply interested in the 
preservation of the good old customs, and it was in some cases, 
certainly this class, the most powerful in a mediaeval borough, 
who raised the protest against the indifference and neglect of the 
townspeople for public processions and merry-making, because 
"thereby the victuallers lose their money," and who insisted on 
the revival of these festivals for the encouragement of trade. 
Probably where the crafts were strong and the votes of the working 
people carried the day, the decision turned the other way. 

§ 9. The Church as a Centre of Town Life 

All the multitudinous activities and accidents of this common 
life were summed up for the people in the parish church that 
stood in their market-place, close to the Common House or Gild 
Hall. This was the fortress of the borough against its enemies — 
its place of safety where the treasure of the commons was stored 
in dangerous times, the arms in the steeple, the wealth of corn or 
wool or precious goods in the church itself, guarded by a sentence 
of excommunication against all who should violate so sacred a 
protection. Its shrines were hung with the strange new things 
which English sailors had begun to bring across the great seas — 
with "horns of unicorns," ostrich eggs, or walrus tusks, or the 
rib of a whale given by Sebastian Cabot. From the church tower 
the bell rang out which called the people to arm for the com- 
mon defence or summoned a general assembly or proclaimed the 
opening of the market. Burghers had their seats in the church 
apportioned to them by the corporation in the same rank and order 
as the stalls which it had already assigned to them in the market- 
place. 

The city officers and their wives sat in the chief places of honor ; 
next to them came tradesmen according to their degree with their 
families honorably "y-parroked (parked) in pews," where Wrath 
sat among the proud ladies who quarrelled as to which should 
first receive the holy bread; while "apprentices and servants 
shall sit or stand in the alleys." There on Sundays and feast- 
days the people came to hear any news of importance to the com- 
munity, whether it was a list of strayed sheep, or a proclamation 



Town Life in the Middle Ages 199 

by the bailiff of the penalties which had been decreed in the manor 
court against offenders. The church was their common hall, 
where the commonalty met for all kinds of business, to audit 
the town accounts, to divide the common lands, to make grants of 
property, to hire soldiers, or to elect a mayor. There the council 
met on Sundays or festivals, as might best suit their convenience ; 
so that we even hear of a payment made by the priest to the cor- 
poration to induce them not to hold their assemblies in the chancel 
while high mass was being performed. It was the natural place 
for justices to sit and hear cases of assault and theft, or it might 
serve as a hall where difficult legal questions could be argued out 
by lawyers. 

In the middle of the fifteenth century, when the bishop and the 
mayor of Exeter were in the height of a fierce contest about the 
government of the town, they met for discussion in the cathedral. 
"When my lord had said his prayers at the high altar he went 
apart to the side altar by himself and called to him apart 
the mayor and no more, and there communed together a great 
while." And on this common ground the dean and chapter 
on the one side and the mayor and town council on the other, 
attended by their respective lawyers, fought out the questions of 
law on which the case turned. In fair time the throng of traders 
expected to be allowed to overflow from the High Street into the 
cathedral precincts, and were "ever wont and used ... to lay 
open, buy, and sell divers merchandises in the said church and 
cemetery and special in the king's highway there as at Wells, 
Salisbury, and other places more, as dishes, bowls, and other 
things like, and in the said church ornaments for the same and 
other jewels convenient thereto." In a draft presentation to a 
London vicarage of 1427 there is a written memorandum with 
an order from the king that no fairs or markets shall be held in 
sanctuaries, "for the honor of Holy Church." Edward the First 
had indeed forbidden such fairs in his statute of merchants; but 
such an order was little in harmony with the habits and customs 
of the age; and if there was an occasional stirring of conscience 
in the matter, it was not till the time of Laud that the public 
attained to a conviction, or acquiesced in an authoritative asser- 
tion that the Church was desecrated by the transaction in it of 
common business. 

In the Middle Ages, however, the townspeople were connected 
with their parish Church after a fashion which has long been un- 
known among us. They were frequently the lay rectors; they 



200 English Historians 

appointed the wardens and churchwardens; they had control 
of the funds and the administration of lands left for maintaining 
its services and fabric; sometimes they laid claim to the fees 
paid for masses. The popular interest might even extend to the 
criticism and discipline of the rector, so that in Bridport an inquiry 
of the bishop as to whether his chaplain, "a foreigner from Brit- 
tany," was "drunk every day" was held in presence of "a copious 
multitude of the parishioners," and twelve townsmen acted as 
witnesses. If a religious gild had become identified with the 
corporation, the town body and the Church were united by a yet 
closer tie. The corporation of Plymouth, which on its other side 
was the Gild of Our Lady and St. George, issued its instructions 
even as to the use of vestments in St. Andrews, ruling when "the 
best copes and vestments" should be used at funerals, and how 
"the second blue copes " only might be displayed at the burial of 
any man who died without leaving to the Church an offering of 
twenty shillings. 

The people on their side were taxed, and heavily taxed, for the 
various expenses of the Church. Sergeants sent by the town 
Council collected under severe penalties the dues for the blessed 
bread and "trendilles" of wax or "light-silver" for the lights 
burned beside dead bodies laid in the church, and the town treas- 
ury paid for "coals for the new fire on Easter Eve." If a church 
had to be repaired or rebuilt, the pressure of spiritual hopes or 
fears, the habit of public duty, the boastfulness of local pride, 
all the influences that might stimulate the common effort were 
raised to their highest efficiency by the watchful care of the corpora- 
tion. All necessary orders were sent out by the mayor, who with 
the town council determined the share which the inhabitants 
were to take in the work ; and in small and destitute parishes where 
the principle of self-help and independence was quite as fully 
recognized as it was in bigger and richer towns, real sacrifices 
were demanded. Men gave their money or their labor or the 
work of their horse and cart, or they offered a sheep or fowls, 
or perhaps rings and personal ornaments. 

In the pride of their growing municipal life the poorest boroughs 
built new towers and hung new chimes worthy of the latest popu- 
lar ideals. The inhabitants of Totnes were so poor that in 1449 
there were only three people in the town who paid as much as 
twenty pence for the tax of half-tenths and fifteenths for the king. 
But since Totnes had four new bells which had been anointed and 
consecrated in 1442, it decided that the old wooden belfry of the 



Town Life in the Middle Ages 201 

parish church should be replaced by a new stone tower. A master 
mason was appointed in 1448, and "supervisors" were chosen to 
visit the bell towers of all the country round and to make that at 
Totnes "according to the best model." The proctors of the 
church provided shovels and pick-axes, and the parishioners 
were called out to dig stones from the quarry ; every one who had 
a horse was to help in carrying the stones, "but without coercion;" 
while "those who have no horses of their own are to work with 
the horses of other persons, but at their own cost." 

Last of all an ordinance was made that the mayor, vicar, and 
proctors of the church should go round to each parishioner and 
see how much he would give to the collection on Sundays for the 
bell tower, and those who contributed nothing were to have their 
names entered on a roll and sent to the archdeacon's court. When 
St. Andrews at Plymouth was enlarged, the town authorities de- 
cided that the money should be collected by means of a yearly 
"church-ale." Taverns were closed by order of the council on a 
certain day, and every ward of the town made for itself a "hale" 
or booth in the cemetery of the parish church. All inhabitants of 
the wards were commanded to come with as many friends and 
acquaintances as possible "for the increasing of the said ale," 
and to bring with them "except bread and drink such victual as 
they like best" ; but they must buy at the "hale," "bread and ale 
as it cometh thereto for their dinners and suppers the same day." 
After ten years of these picnics in the churchyard the new aisle 
of St. Andrews was finished at a cost of £44. 14s. 6d. 

§ 10. Unity of Interests and Public Spirit in the Mediceval Town 

In the midst of this busy life — a life where the citizens them- 
selves watched over their boundaries, defended their territory, 
kept peace in their borders, took charge of the common property, 
governed the spending of the town treasure, labored with their 
own hands at all public works, ordered their own amusements — 
the mediaeval burgher had his training. The claims of the common- 
wealth were never allowed to slip from his remembrance. As all 
the affairs of the town were matters of public responsibility, so 
all the incidents of its life were made matters of public knowledge. 
The ancient "common horn" or the "common bell" announced 
the opening of the market, or the holding of the mayor's court, 
or called the townspeople together in time of danger. Criers went 
about the streets to proclaim the ordinances of the community, and 



202 English Historians 

to remind the citizens of their duties. From the church stile or 
in the market-place they summoned men to the king's muster, or 
called them to their place in the town's ship or barge; or if danger 
from an enemy threatened, warned the citizens "to have harness 
carried to the proper places," or "to have cattle or hogs out of 
the fields." They exhorted the people "to leave dice-playing," 
' ' to cease ball-playing, and to take to bows " ; to shut the shops at 
service time ; " to have water at men's doors " for fear of fire. The 
crier "called" any proclamation of the king in the public places 
of the town ; he declared deeds of pardon granted to any criminal 
or proclaimed that some poor wretch who had taken sanctuary in 
the church had abjured the kingdom and was to be allowed to 
depart safely through the streets. Perhaps the "cry" was made 
that a prisoner had been thrown into the town jail on suspicion, 
and accusers were called to appear if they had any charge to bring 
against him ; or it was announced that the will of a deceased towns- 
man was about to be proved in the courthouse, if there were 
any who desired to raise objections; or there was proclamation 
that a burgher had offended against the laws of the community 
and was degraded from the freedom of the town, or perhaps ban- 
ished forever from its territory. At other times players and min- 
strels would pass through the market-place and streets "crying 
the banns" of their plays. The merchant, the apprentice, the 
journeyman, the shopkeeper, gathered in the same crowd to hear 
the crier who recorded every incident in the town life or brought 
tidings of coming change. News was open, public, without dis- 
tinction of persons. 

Where the claims of local life were so exacting and so overpower- 
ing we can scarcely wonder if the burgher took little thought for 
matters that lay beyond his "parish." But within the narrow 
limits of the town dominions his experience was rich and varied. 
While townsmen were forced at every turn to discover and justify 
the limits of their privileges, or while controversies raged among 
them as to how the government of the community should be carried 
on, there was no lack of political teaching; and all questions 
"touching the great commonalty of the city" for whose liberties 
they had fought and whose constitution they had shaped, stirred 
loyal citizens to a genuine patriotism. Traders too, intent on the 
development of their business, were deeply concerned in all the 
questions that affected commerce, the securing of communica- 
tions, the opening of new roads for trade, or the organization 
of labor. In such matters activity could never sleep ; for the towns 



Town Life in the Middle Ages 203 

anticipated modern nations in the faith that the advantage of one 
community must be the detriment of another, and competition 
and commercial jealousy ran high. Never perhaps in English 
history was local feeling so strong. Public virtue was summed up 
in an ardent municipal zeal, as lively among the "Imperial Co- 
citizens " of New Sarum as among the "Great Clothing" of bigger 
boroughs. In those days, indeed, busy provincials but dimly con- 
scious of national policy found in the confusion of court politics 
and the distraction of its intrigues, or in the feuds of a divided and 
bewildered administration, no true call to national service and no 
popular leader to quicken their sympathies. 

Civil wars which swept over the country at the bidding of a 
factious group of nobles or of a vain and unscrupulous kingmaker 
left, and justly left, the towns supremely indifferent to any ques- 
tion save that of how to make the best terms for themselves from 
the winning side, or to use the disasters of warring lords so as 
to extend their own privileges. Meanwhile in the intense effort 
called out by the new industrial and commercial conditions and 
the reorganization of social life which they demanded, it was 
inevitable that there should grow up in the boroughs the temper 
of men absorbed in a critical struggle for ends which however 
important were still personal, local, limited, purely material — 
a temper inspired by private interest and with its essential narrow- 
ness untouched by the finer conceptions through which a great 
patriotism is nourished. Such a temper, if it brought at first 
great rewards, brought its own penalties at last, when the towns, 
self-dependent, unused to confederation for public purposes, 
destitute of the generous spirit of national regard, and by their 
ignorance and narrow outlook left helpless in presence of the 
revolutions that were to usher in the modern world, saw the govern- 
ment of their trade and the ordering of their constitutions taken 
from them, and their councils degraded by the later royal despot- 
ism into the instruments and support of tyranny. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE CHURCH IN THE MIDDLE AGES 

No student of mediaeval history can neglect the Church both 
as an institutional expression of the religious life of the age and 
as a body of men occupying a position of great power by means 
of their possessions, their learning, and their spiritual authority. 
The hierarchy of the Church in England, its cardinal doc- 
trines, its claims over the moral and secular life of man, its 
contests with the kings for power, its relations with the See of 
Rome — these and many more problems of fundamental impor- 
tance confront the student who would understand the forces at 
work in mediaeval society. In the language of Professor Mait- 
land, the Church of Christendom "was a wonderful system. The 
whole of Western Europe was subject to the jurisdiction of one 
tribunal of last resort, the Roman curia. Appeals were encour- 
aged by all manner of means, appeals at almost every stage of 
almost every proceeding. But the pope was far more than the 
president of a court of appeal. Very frequently the courts Chris- 
tian which did justice in England were acting under his supervision 
and carrying out his written instructions. A very large part and 
by far the most permanently important part of the ecclesiastical 
litigation that went on in the country came before English prelates 
who were sitting not as judges ordinary, but as mere delegates of 
the pope, commissioned to hear and determine this or that par- 
ticular case. Bracton, indeed, treats the pope as the ordinary 
judge of every Englishman in spiritual things, and the only ordi- 
nary judge whose powers are unlimited." For the various features 
of the English mediaeval Church as an institution, every student 
must turn to the weighty pages of Dr. Stubbs, whose profound 

204 



The Church in the Middle Ages 205 

historical knowledge and ecclesiastical training peculiarly fitted 
him for the task of writing on this complicated subject. 

§ 1. The Spirituality of England as an Organization within the 

State l 

In approaching the history of the mediaeval church, we may 
regard the spirituality of England, the clergy or clerical estate, 
as a body completely organized, with a minutely constituted and 
regulated hierarchy, possessing the right of legislating for itself 
and taxing itself, having its recognized assemblies, judicature, and 
executive, and, although not as a legal corporation holding common 
property, yet composed of a great number of persons each of whom 
possesses corporate property by a title which is either conferred 
by ecclesiastical authority, or is not to be acquired without eccle- 
siastical assent. The spirituality is by itself an estate of the 
realm; its leading members, the bishops and certain abbots, 
are likewise members of the estate of baronage ; the inferior clergy, 
if they possess lay property or temporal endowments, are likewise 
members of the estate of the commons. 

The property which is held by individuals as officers and minis- 
ters of the spirituality is either temporal property — that is, lands 
held by ordinary legal services, or spiritual property — that is, 
tithes and oblations. As an estate of the realm the spirituality 
recognizes the headship of the king; as a member of the Church 
Catholic it recognizes, according to the mediaeval idea, the head- 
ship of the pope. Its own chief ministers, the bishops under their 
two metropolitans and under the primacy of the Church of Canter- 
bury, stand in an immediate relation to both these powers, and 
the inferior clergy have through the bishops a mediate relation, 
while as subjects and as Catholic Christians they have also an 
immediate relation to both king and pope. They recognize the 
king as supreme in matters temporal, and the pope as supreme 
in matters spiritual ; but there are questions as to the exact limits 
between the spiritual and the temporal, and most important 
questions touching the precise relations between the crown and 
the papacy. In mediaeval theory the king is a spiritual son of 
the pope; and the pope may be the king's superior in things 
spiritual only, or in things spiritual and temporal alike. 

1 Stubbs, Constitutional History of England, Vol. Ill, chap. xix. By 
permission of the Delegates of the Clarendon Press, Oxford. 



206 English Historians 



§ 2. Temporal Superiority of the Papacy 

The temporal superiority of the papacy may be held to depend 
upon two principles: the first is embodied in the general propo- 
sition asserted by Gregory VII and his successors that the pope is 
supreme over temporal sovereigns; the spiritual power is by its 
very nature superior to the temporal, and of that spiritual power 
the pope is on earth the supreme depository. This proposition 
may be accepted or denied, but it implies a rule equally applicable 
to all kingdoms. The second principle involves the claim to 
special superiority over a particular kingdom, such as was at differ- 
ent times made by the popes in reference to England, Scotland, 
Ireland, Naples, and the empire itself, and turns upon the special 
circumstances of the countries so claimed. These two principles 
are in English history of unequal importance: the first, resting 
upon a dogmatic foundation has, so far as it is recognized at all, 
a perpetual and semi-religious force; the latter, resting upon 
legal assumptions and historical acts, has more momentary promi- 
nence, but less real significance. 

The claim of the pope to receive homage from William the 
Conqueror, on whatever it was based, was rejected by the king, 
and both he and William Rufus maintained their right to deter- 
mine which of the two contending popes was entitled to the obe- 
dience of the English Church. Henry II, when he received Ire- 
land as a gift from Adrian IV, never intended to admit that the 
papal power over all islands inferred from the donation of Con- 
stantine could be understood so as to bring England under the 
direct authority of Rome; nor when, after Becket's murder, he 
declared his adhesion to the pope, did he contemplate more than 
a spiritual or religious relation. John's surrender and subsequent 
homage first created the shadow of a feudal relation, which was 
respected by Henry III, but repudiated by the Parliaments of 
Edward I and Edward III, and passed away, leaving scarcely a 
trace under the later kings. . . . 

§ 3. Election of Bishops 

Whatever was the precise nature of the papal supremacy, the 
highest dignity in the hierarchy of the national Church was under- 
stood to belong to the Church of Canterbury, of which the arch- 
bishop was the head and minister; he was alterius orbis papa; 



The Church in the Middle Ages 207 

he was likewise, and in consequence, the first constitutional adviser 
of the crown. The Archbishop of York and the bishops shared, 
in a somewhat lower degree, both his spiritual and his temporal 
authority ; like him they had large estates which they held of the 
king, seats in the national council, preeminence in the national 
synod, and places in the general councils of the Church. The 
right of appointing the bishops and of regulating their powers 
was thus one of the first points upon which the national Church, 
the crown, and the papacy were likely to come into collision. 

The cooperation of clergy and laity in the election of bishops 
before the Conquest has been already illustrated. The struggle 
between Henry I and Anselm on the question of investiture ter- 
minated in a compromise; the king gave up his claim to invest 
with staff and ring ; the archbishop undertook that no bishop elect 
should be disqualified for consecration by the fact that he had done 
homage to the king. Although Henry retained the power of nomi- 
nating to the vacant sees, the compact resulted in a shadowy 
recognition of the right of canonical election claimed by the chap- 
ters of the cathedrals, and exercised occasionally under the royal 
dictation; to the metropolitan, of course, belonged consecration 
and the bestowal of the spiritualities; temporal property and 
authority were received from the royal hands. Stephen at his 
accession more distinctly recognized the rule of canonical sub- 
stitution, and in his reign the clergy contended with some success 
for their rights. 

' Henry II and Richard observed the form of election under 
strict supervision, and John, shortly before he granted the great 
charter, issued as a bribe to the bishops a shorter charter con- 
firming the right of free election, subject to the royal license and 
approval, neither of w T hich was to be withheld without just cause. 
This charter of John may be regarded as the fullest and final 
recognition of the canonical right which had been maintained as 
the common law of the Church ever since the Conquest ; which had 
been ostensibly respected since the reign of Henry I ; and which 
the crown, however often it evaded it, did not henceforth attempt 
to override. 

The earlier practice, recorded in the Constitutions of Clarendon, 
according to which the election was made in the curia regis, in 
a national council, or in the royal chapel before the justiciar, a 
relic perhaps of the custom of nominating the prelates in the 
Witenagemot, was superseded by this enactment: the election 
took place in the chapter-house of the cathedral, and the king's 



208 English Historians 

wishes were signified by letter or message, not as before by direct 
dictation. When the elected prelate had obtained the royal assent 
to his promotion, the election was examined and confirmed by 
the metropolitan; and the ceremony of consecration completed 
the spiritual character of the bishop. On his confirmation, the 
elected prelate received the spiritualities of his see, the right of 
ecclesiastical jurisdiction in his diocese, which during the vacancy 
had been in the hands of the archbishop or of the chapter ; and 
at his consecration he made a profession of obedience to the arch- 
bishop and the metropolitan Church. From the crown, before 
or after consecration, he received the temporalities of his see, and 
thereupon made to the king a promise of fealty answering to the 
homage and fealty of a temporal lord. 

§ 4. The Pope and Ecclesiastical Appointments 

It was not until the thirteenth century that the popes began 
to interfere directly in the appointment to the suffragan sees. 
Over the metropolitans they had long before attempted to exer- 
cise a controlling influence, in two ways: by the gift of the pall 
and by the institution of legations. The pall was a sort of collar 
of white wool, with pendent stripes before and behind, embroidered 
with four purple crosses. The lambs from whose wool it was made 
were annually presented by the nuns of St. Agnes, blessed by the 
pope, and kept under the care of apostolic subdeacons; and the 
pall, when it was ready for use, was again blessed at the tomb of 
St. Peter and left there all night. It was presented to the newly 
appointed metropolitans at first as a compliment, but it soon began 
to be regarded as an emblem of metropolitan power, and by and by 
to be accepted as the vehicle by which metropolitan power was 
conveyed. 

The bestowal of the pall was in its origin Byzantine, the right 
to wear some such portion of the imperial dress having been be- 
stowed by the emperor on his patriarchs: in the newer form it 
had become a regular institution before the foundation of the 
English Church;. St. Gregory sent a pall to Augustine, and so im- 
portant was the matter that, even after the breach with Rome, 
Archbishop Holdegate of York in 1545 went through the form of 
receiving one from Cranmer. Until he received the pall the arch- 
bishop did not, except under very peculiar circumstances, venture 
to consecrate bishops. On the occasion of its reception he had 
to swear obedience to the pope in a form which gradually became 



The Church in the Middle Ages 209 

more stringent; in early times he undertook a journey to Rome 
for the purpose; but after the time of Lanfranc the pall was 
generally brought by special envoys from the apostolic see, and a 
great ceremony took place on the occasion of the investiture. 
This transaction formed a very close link between the archbishop 
and the pope, and, although the pall was never refused to a duly 
qualified candidate, the claim of a discretion to give or refuse in 
fact attributed to the pope a power of veto on the elections made 
by national churches and sovereigns. . . . 

By the statute of pro visors, in 135 1, it was enacted that all 
persons receiving papal provisions should be liable to imprison- 
ment, and that all the preferments to which the pope nominated 
should be forfeit for that turn to the king. But even this bold 
measure, in which the good sense of the Parliament condemned 
the proceedings of the pope, was turned by royal manipulation 
to the advantage of the crown alone. A system was devised which 
saved the dignity of all parties. When a see became vacant, the 
king sent to the chapter his license to elect, accompanied or 
followed by a letter nominating the person whom he would accept 
if elected. He also, by letter to the pope, requested that the 
same person might be appointed by papal provision. With equal 
complaisance the chapters elected and the popes provided. The 
pope retained, however, the nomination to sees vacant by trans- 
lation, which vacancies he took care to multiply. This arrange- 
ment was very displeasing to the country, for the question of 
patronage, in other cases besides bishoprics, was becoming com- 
plicated to an extreme degree ; the king presented to livings which 
were not vacant, and displaced incumbents by his writ of quare 
impedit; the pope's right of reservation affected the tenure of every 
benefice in the country. 

At length, after long debates by way of letter, in 1374, a congress 
was held at Bruges for determining the general question; in 1375 
Gregory XI annulled the appointments which he and his prede- 
cessor had made in opposition to the king, and in 1377 Edward 
was able to announce that whilst he himself gave up certain pieces 
of patronage, the pope had by word of mouth undertaken to abstain 
from reservations and to allow free elections to bishoprics. But 
this promise was as illusory as all that had gone before. The 
troubles of the next reign prevented England from taking advan- 
tage, as might have been expected, of the weakness of the papacy, 
now in a state of schism. Richard and his opponents were alike 
intent rather on using the papal influence for their own ends than 
p 



210 English Historians 

on securing the freedom of the Church. In 1388 Urban VI, at the 
instance of the lords, translated Alexander Neville from York to 
St. Andrews, and Thomas Arundel from Ely to York. Such a 
breach of law would in ordinary times have called forth a loud 
protest, but party spirit was rampant, and none was heard. In 
1390 the statute of pro visors was reenacted and confirmed, and 
in 1393 the great statute of praemunire secured, for the time, the 
observance of the statute of provisors. In 1395 the election to 
Exeter was made without papal interference, but in 1396 the bishops 
of Worcester and St. Asaph were appointed by provision ; and in 
1397 Richard procured the pope's assistance in translating Arundel 
to St. Andrews, and in appointing Walden to Canterbury ; Boniface 
IX, the same year, translated Bishop Bockingham from Lincoln 
to Lichfield against his own will, and appointed Henry Beaufort 
in his place. 

Archbishop Arundel and Henry IV managed the episcopal 
appointments during the latter years of the great schism; and 
Henry V, among the other pious acts by which he earned the 
support of the clergy, recognized the elective rights of the chapters, 
the Parliament also agreeing that the confirmation of the election 
should, during the vacancy of the apostolic see, be performed as 
it had been of old by the metropolitans. For two or three years 
the whole of the long disused process was revived and the Church 
was free. But Martin V, when he found himself seated firmly 
on his throne, was not content to wield less power than his prede- 
cessors had claimed. He provided thirteen bishops in two years, 
and threatened to suspend Chichele's legation because he was 
unable to procure the repeal of the restraining statutes. An 
attempt of the pope, however, to force Bishop Fleming into the See 
of York was signally defeated. 

The weakness and devotion of Henry VI laid him open to much 
aggression; during the whole of Stafford's primacy the pope 
filled up the sees by provision ; the council nominated their candi- 
dates ; at Rome the proctors of the parties contrived a compromise; 
wmoever otherwise lost or gained, the apostolic see obtained a 
recognition of its claim. During the latter years of our period 
the deficiency of records makes it impossible to determine whether 
the exercise of that claim was real or nominal ; certainly the kings 
had no difficulty in obtaining the promotion of their creatures; 
a few Italian absentees were, on the other hand, allowed to hold 
sees in England and act as royal agents at Rome. Under Henry 
VII and Henry VIII the royal nominees were invariably chosen; 



The Church in the Middle Ages lit 

the popes had other objects in view than the influencing of the 
national churches, and the end of their spiritual domination was 
at hand. The clergy, too, were unable to stand alone against 
royal and papal pressure and placed themselves at the disposal 
of the government; the government was ready to use them, and 
paid for their service by promotion. . . . 

§ 5. National Legislation and Papal Jurisdiction 

The statute of praemunire was intended to prevent encroach- 
ments on and usurpations of royal jurisdiction. The ordinance 
of 1353, which was enrolled as a " statute against annullers of 
judgments in the king's courts," condemns to outlawry, for- 
feiture, and imprisonment all persons who, having prosecuted in 
foreign courts suits cognizable by the law of England, should not 
appear in obedience to summons, and answer for their contempt. 
The name prawiunire, which marks this form of legislation, is 
taken from the opening word of the writ by which the sheriff is 
charged to summon the delinquent. It is somewhat curious that 
the court of Rome is not mentioned in this first act of praemunire; 
as the assembly by which it was framed was not a proper parlia- 
ment, it may not have been referred to the lords spiritual; their 
assent is not mentioned. The act, however, of 1365, which con- 
firms the statute of provisors, distinctly brings the suitors in the 
papal courts under the provisions of the ordinance of 1353, and 
against this the prelates protested. 

In spite of the similar protest in 1393, the Parliament passed a 
still more important statute, in which the word prcemunire is used 
to denote the process by which the law is enforced. This act, 
which is one of the strongest defensive measures taken durirg the 
Middle Ages against Rome, was called for in consequence of the 
conduct of the pope, who had forbidden the bishops to execute 
the sentences of the royal courts in suits connected with patronage. 
The political translations of the year 1388 were adroitly turned 
into an argument; the pope had translated bishops against their 
own will to foreign sees, and had endangered the freedom of the 
English crown, "which hath been so free at all times that it hath 
been in subjection to no earthly sovereign, but immediately sub- 
ject to God and no other, in all things touching the regalie of the 
said crown." The lords spiritual had admitted that such en- 
croachments were contrary to the right of the crown, and promised 
to stand by the king. It was accordingly enacted that all persons 



212 English Historians 

procuring in the court of Rome or elsewhere such translations, 
processes, sentences of excommunication, bulls, instruments, 
or other things which touch the king, his crown, regality, or realm, 
should suffer the penalties of praemunire. The legislation exem- 
plified in the statutes of praemunire and provisors was not a mere 
brutum julmen; although evaded by the kings, — notably, by 
Richard himself in the translation of Arundel to St. Andrew's in 
1397, — and, so far at least as the statute of provisors was con- 
cerned, suspended from time to time by consent of the Parliament, 
it was felt by the popes to be a great check on their freedom of 
action ; it was used by Gloucester as a weapon against Beaufort ; 
the clergy, both under papal influence and independently, peti- 
tioned from time to time for its repeal ; and in the hands, of Henry 
VIII it became a lever for the overthrow of papal supremacy. 
It furnishes in ecclesiastical history the clew of the events that 
connect the Constitutions of Clarendon with the Reformation; 
and, if in a narrative of the internal history of the constitution 
itself it seems to take a secondary place, it is only because the influ- 
ences which it was devised to check were everywhere at work, 
and constant recurrence to their potent action would involve two 
separate readings of the history of every great crisis and every 
stage of growth. 

§ 6. Convocations of the English Clergy 

The convocations of the two provinces as the recognized con- 
stitutional assemblies of the English clergy have undergone, ex- 
cept in the removal of the monastic members at the dissolution, no 
change of organization from the reign of Edward I down to the 
present day. The clergy, moreover, are still, by the prcemiinientes 
clause in the parliamentary writ of the bishops, ordered to attend 
by their proctors at the session of Parliament. On both these 
points enough has been said in former chapters; and here it is 
necessary only to mention the particulars in which external press- 
ure was applied to multiply meetings or accelerate proceedings. 
The clergy from the very first showed great reluctance to obey the 
royal summons under the prcemunientes clause, and accordingly 
during a great part of the reigns of Edward II and Edward III, 
from the year 13 14 to the year 1340, a separate letter was addressed 
to the two archbishops at the calling of each Parliament, urging 
them to compel the attendance of the clerical estate. This was 
ineffectual ; and after the latter year the crown, having acquiesced 






The Church in the Middle Ages 213 

in the rule that the clerical tenths should be granted in the pro- 
vincial convocations, seems to have cared less about the attendance 
of representative proctors in Parliament. On two or three critical 
occasions the clerical proctors were called on to share the respon- 
sibilities of Parliament ; but their attendance ceased to be more 
than formal, and probably from the beginning of the fifteenth 
century ceased altogether. 

With regard to the constitution of the convocations, the only 
question which has taken its place in political history is that of 
their relation to Parliament; and this question affects only those 
sessions of convocation which were held in consequence of a re- 
quest or a command issued by the king with a view to a grant of 
money. The organization of the two provincial assemblies was 
applicable to all sorts of public business, and the archbishops seem 
to have encountered no opposition from the king on any occasion 
on which they thought it necessary to call their clergy together. 
The means to be taken for the extirpation of heresy, for the reform 
of manners, for the dealings with foreign churches and general 
councils, might be, and no doubt were, generally concerted in such 
assemblies. Archbishop Arundel and his successors held several 
of these councils, which are not to be distinguished from the con- 
vocations called at the king's request in any point except that they 
were called without any such request. 

As however parliaments and convocations had this much in 
common, that the need of pecuniary aid was the king's chief 
reason for summoning them, it might naturally be expected that, 
when a Parliament was called , the convocations would at no great 
distance of time be summoned to supplement its liberality with a 
clerical gift. We have seen how regularly this function was dis- 
charged during the fifteenth century, and how the clerical grant 
followed in due proportion the grant of the laity. But although in 
nearly every case there is a session of convocation to match the 
session of Parliament, the session of convocation cannot be re- 
garded as an adjunct of Parliament. Archbishop Wake, in his 
great controversy with Atterbury, showed from an exhaustive 
enumeration of instances that, even where the purpose of the two 
assemblies was the same, there was no such close dependence of 
the convocation upon the Parliament as was usual after the changes 
introduced by Henry VIII. 

The king very seldom even suggests the day for the meeting of 
convocation ; its sessions and adjournments take place quite irre- 
spective of those of Parliament; very rare attempts are made to 



114 English Historians 

interfere with its proceedings even when they are unauthorized by 
the royal writ of request ; and, after the accession of the House of 
Lancaster, they are not interfered with at all. On the side of the 
papacy, interference could scarcely be looked for. As a legate 
could exercise no jurisdiction at all without royal license, a legatine 
council could not be held in opposition to the king^s will ; but the 
days of legatine councils of the whole national Church seemed at all 
events to be over; there is no trace of any important meeting of 
such assembly between the days of Arundel and those of Wolsey; 
although, after the date at which both archbishops acquired the 
legatine character, both the provincial convocations might be in- 
vidiously represented as legatine councils. . . . 

§ 7. National Legislation Relating to the Church 

The several legislative measures by which at various times the 
crown or the Parliament endeavored to regulate the proceedings 
of the national Church may be best arranged by reference to the 
particular subject-matter of the acts. They are important con- 
stitutional muniments, but are not very numerous or diversified. 
First among them come the ordinances or statutes by which the 
tenure of church property was defined and its extension limited. 
The establishment of the obligation of homage and fealty due for 
the temporalities or lands of the clergy was the result of a com- 
promise between Henry I and Anselm, and it was accordingly not 
so much an enactment made by the secular power against the 
ecclesiastical as a concordat betwixt the two. 

It was not so with the mortmain act, or with the series of pro- 
visions in which the statute u de religiosis" was prefigured, from 
the great charter downwards. To forbid the acquisition of lands 
by the clergy, without the consent of the overlord of whom the 
lands were held, was a necessary measure and one to which a 
patriotic ecclesiastic like Langton would have had no objection 
to urge. But the spirit of the clergy had very much changed 
between 1215 and 1279, and the statute "de religiosis," which was 
not so much an act of Parliament as a royal ordinance, was issued 
at a moment when there was much irritation of feeling between 
the king and the archbishop. It was an efficient limitation on the 
greed of acquisition, and although very temperately administered 
by the kings, who never withheld their license from the endowment 
of any valuable new foundation, it was viewed with great dislike 
by the popes, who constantly urged its repeal, and by the monks 






The Church in the Middle Ages 215 

whose attempts to frustrate the intention of the law by the inven- 
tion of trusts and uses, are regarded by the lawyers as an important 
contribution to the land-law of the Middle Ages. 

Other instances of legislation less directly affecting the lands 
of the Church were the acts by which the estates of the Templars 
were transferred to the Hospitallers, and the many enactments from 
the reign of Edward III downwards, by which the estates of the 
alien priories were vested in the king. Beyond these, however, 
which are mere instances of the use of a constitutional power, it 
is certain that not only the parliaments but the crown and the 
courts of law exercised over the lands of the clergy the same power 
that they exercised over all other lands ; they were liable to tem- 
porary confiscation in case of the misbehavior of their owners, 
to taxation, and the constrained performance of the due services; 
and although they were not liable to legal forfeiture, as their 
possessors could be deprived of no greater right in them than was 
involved in their official tenure, they might be detained in the royal 
hands on one pretext or another for long periods without legal 
remedy. 

The patronage of parish churches was likewise a temporal right, 
and, although the ecclesiastical courts made now and then a vain 
claim to determine suits concerning it, it was always regarded as 
within the province of state legislation. The spiritual revenues of 
the clergy, the tithes and offerings which were the endowment of 
the parochial churches, were subject to a divided jurisdiction ; the 
title to ownership was determined by the common law, the enforce- 
ment of payment was left to the ecclesiastical courts. The at- 
tempts of the Parliament to tax the spiritualities were very jealously 
watched, and generally, if not always, defeated. The Parliament, 
however, practically vindicated its right to determine the nature 
of the rights of the clergy to tithe of underwood, minerals, and 
other newly asserted or revived claims. In 1362 a statute fixed the 
wages of stipendiary chaplains. 

A second department in which the spirituality was subjected to 
the legislative interference of the State was that of judicature. In 
this region a continual rivalry was carried on from the Conquest to 
the Reformation, the courts of the two powers, like all courts of law, 
being prone to make attempts at usurpation, and the interference 
of the crown as the fountain of justice, or of the Parliament as 
representing the nation at large, being constantly invoked to 
remedy the evils caused by mutual aggression. Of the defining 
limits of this legislation, the "articuli cleri" of 1316, and the writ 



216 English Historians 

of " circumspecte agatis," neither of them exactly or normally 
statutes, are the chief landmarks. In order to avoid repetition, we 
may defer noticing these disputes until we come to the general 
question of judicature. . . . 

§ 8. Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction 

We come to the last of our constitutional inquiries, that of 
judicature: the subject of jurisdiction of, by, and for the clergy, 
which has been through the whole period of English history one of 
the most important influences on the social condition of the nation, 
the occasion of some of its most critical experiences, and one of its 
greatest administrative difficulties. In the very brief notice which 
can be here given to it, it will be necessary to arrange the points 
which come before us under the following heads : first, the juris- 
diction exercised by the secular courts over ecclesiastical persons 
and causes; secondly, the jurisdiction exercised by the spiritual 
courts over laymen and temporal causes ; thirdly, the jurisdiction 
of the spiritual courts over the clergy; and fourthly, the judicial 
claims and recognized authority on judicial matters of the pope of 
Rome. 

All suits touching the temporalities of the clergy were subject 
to the jurisdiction of the king's courts, and against so reasonable 
a rule scarcely any traces of resistance on the part of the clergy are 
found. Yet it is not improbable that during the quarrels of the 
twelfth century some question on the right of the bishop to try 
such suits may have arisen. Glanville gives certain forms of 
prohibition in which the ecclesiastical judges are forbidden to 
entertain suits in which a lay fee is concerned ; and Alexander III, 
in a letter addressed to the bishops in 1178, directed them to ab- 
stain from hearing such causes, the exclusive jurisdiction of which 
belonged to the king. In reference to lands held in frankalmoign, 
disputes between clergymen belonged to the ecclesiastical courts; 
but the question whether the land in dispute was held by this 
tenure or as a lay fee was decided by a recognition under the king's 
writ. 

The jurisdiction as to tithes was similarly a debateable land 
between the two jurisdictions, the title to the ownership, as in 
questions of advowson and presentation, belonging to the secular 
courts, and the process of recovery belonging to the court Christian. 
The right of defining matters titheable was claimed by the arch- 
bishops in their constitutions, but without much success, the local 



The Church in the Middle Ages 217 

custom and prescription being generally received as decisive in 
the matter. The right of patronage was determined in the king's 
courts. In each of these departments, however, some concert 
with the ecclesiastical courts was indispensable ; many issues of 
fact were referred by the royal tribunals to the court Christian to be 
decided there, and the interlacing, so to speak, of the two juris- 
dictions was the occasion of many disputes both on general prin- 
ciple and in particular causes. These disputes, notwithstanding 
the legislative activity of the kings and the general good under- 
standing which subsisted between them and the prelates, were not 
during the Middle Ages authoritatively and finally decided. It 
is enough for our present purpose to state generally the tendency 
to draw all causes which in any way concerned landed property 
into the royal courts, and to prevent all attempts at a rival juris- 
diction. . . . 

In criminal suits the position of the clergy was more defensible. 
The secular courts were bound to assist the spiritual courts in 
obtaining redress and vindication for clergymen who were injured 
by laymen ; in cases in which the clerk himself was accused, the 
clerical immunity from trial by the secular judge was freely recog- 
nized. If the ordinary claimed the incriminated clerk, the secular 
court surrendered him for ecclesiastical trial : the accused might 
claim the benefit of clergy either before trial or after conviction 
in the lay court ; and it was not until the fifteenth century that any 
very definite regulation of this dangerous immunity was arrived 
at. We have seen the importance which the jurisdiction over 
criminous clerks assumed in the first quarrel between Becket and 
Henry II. It was with the utmost reluctance that the clergy 
admitted the decision of the legate Hugo Pierleoni, that the king 
might arrest and punish clerical offenders against the forest law. 

The ordinary, moved by a sense of justice or by a natural dis- 
like to acknowledge the clerical character of a criminal, would not 
probably, except in times of political excitement, interfere to save 
the convicted clerk ; and in many cases the process of retributive 
justice was too rapid to allow of his interposition. It is not a little 
curious, however, to find that Henry IV, at the time of his closest 
alliance with Arundel, did not hesitate to threaten archbishops and 
bishops with condign punishment for treason ; that on one famous 
occasion he carried the threat into execution ; and that the hanging 
of the mendicant friars, who spread treason in the earlier years of 
his reign, was a summary proceeding which would have endangered 
the throne of a weak king even in less tumultuous times. 



2i 8 English Historians 

Into the legal minutiae of these points we are not called on to 
enter : as to their social and constitutional bearing, it is enough to 
remark that, although, in times when class jealousies are strong, 
clerical immunities are in theory, but in theory only, a safeguard 
of society, their uniform tendency is to keep alive the class jeal- 
ousies; they are among the remedies which perpetuate the evils 
which they imperfectly counteract. In quiet times such immuni- 
ties are unnecessary; in unquiet times they are disregarded. 

Of the temporal causes which were subject to the cognizance of 
ecclesiastical courts the chief were matrimonial and testamentary 
suits, and actions for the recovery of ecclesiastical payments, 
tithes, and customary fees. The whole jurisdiction in questions 
of marriage was, owing to the sacramental character ascribed to 
the ordinance of matrimony, throughout Christendom a spiritual 
jurisdiction. The ecclesiastical jurisdiction in testamentary mat- 
ters and the administration of the goods of persons dying intes- 
tate, was peculiar to England and the sister kingdoms, and had its 
origin, it would appear, in times soon after the Conquest. In 
Anglo-Saxon times there seems to have been no distinct recognition 
of the ecclesiastical character of these causes, and even if there had 
been they would have been tried in the shire-moot. Probate of 
wills is also in many cases a privilege of manorial courts, which 
have nothing ecclesiastical in their composition, and represent the 
more ancient moots in which no doubt the wills of the Anglo-Saxons 
were published. As however the testamentary jurisdiction was 
regarded by Glanville as an undisputed right of the church courts, 
the date of its commencement cannot be put later than the reign 
of Henry I, and it may possibly be as old as the separation of lay 
and spiritual courts. The ''subtraction of tithe" and refusal to 
pay ecclesiastical fees and perquisites were likewise punished by 
spiritual censures which the secular power undertook to enforce. 

As all these departments closely bordered upon the domain of the 
temporal courts, some concert between the two was indispensable ; 
and there were many points on which the certificate of the spiritual 
court was the only evidence on which the temporal court could act; 
in questions of legitimacy, regularity of marriage, the full posses- 
sion of holy orders, and the fact of institution to livings, the assist- 
ance of the spiritual court enabled the temporal courts to complete 
their proceedings in suits touching the title to property, dower, and 
patronage ; and the more ambitious prelates of the thirteenth cen- 
tury claimed the last two departments for the spiritual courts. In 
this, however, they did not obtain any support from Rome, and at 



The Church in the Middle Ages 219 

home the claim was disregarded. Besides these chief points, 
there were other minor suits for wrongs for which the temporal 
courts afforded no remedy, such as slander in cases where the 
evil report did not cause material loss to the person slandered : 
these belonged to the spiritual courts and were punished by 
spiritual penalties. 

Besides the jurisdiction in these matters of temporal concern, 
there was a large field of work for the church courts in disciplinary 
cases: the cognizance of immorality of different kinds, the cor- 
rection of which had as its avowed purpose the benefit of the soul 
of the delinquent. In these trials the courts had their own methods 
of process derived in great measure from the Roman law, with a 
whole apparatus of citations, libels, and witnesses, the process 
of purgation, penance, and, in default of proper satisfaction, ex- 
communication and its resulting penalties enforced by the tem- 
poral law. The sentence of excommunication was the ultimate 
resource of the spiritual courts. If the delinquent held out for 
forty days after the denunciation of this sentence, the king's court, 
by writ of significavit or some similar injunction, ordered the sheriff 
to imprison him until he satisfied the claims of the Church. 

These proceedings furnished employment for a great machinery 
of judicature; the archbishops in their prerogative courts, the 
bishops in their consistories, the archdeacons in some cases, and 
even the spiritual judges of still smaller districts, exercised juris- 
diction in all these matters ; in some points, as in probate and 
administration, coordinately, in others by way of delegation or of 
review and appeal. . . . 

The jurisdiction of the spiritual courts over spiritual men em- 
braced all matters concerning the canonical and moral conduct 
of the clergy : faith, practice, fulfilment of ecclesiastical obligations, 
and obedience to ecclesiastical superiors. For these questions the 
courts possessed a complete jurisprudence of their own, regular 
processes of trial, and prisons in which the convicted offender was 
kept until he had satisfied the justice of the Church. In these 
prisons the clerk, convicted of a crime for which if he had been a 
layman he would have suffered death, endured lifelong captivity; 
here the clerk convicted of a treason or felony in the secular court, 
and subsequently handed over to the ordinary, was kept in safe 
custody. 

In 1402, when Henry IV confirmed the liberties of the clergy, 
the archbishop undertook that no clerk convicted of treason, or 
being a common thief, should be admitted to purgation, and that 



220 English Historians 

this should be secured by a constitution to be made by the bish- 
ops. These prisons, especially after the alarms consequent on 
the Lollard movements, were a grievance in the eyes of the laity, 
who do not seem to have trusted the good faith of the prelates in 
their treatment of delinquent clergy. The promise of Archbishop 
Arundel was not fulfilled. 



Bibliographical Note 

Gneist, History of the English Constitution, chap. xxvi. Capes, History 
of the English Church in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries. Robinson, 
Readings in European History, Vol. I, chap. xvi. For documents, see 
Gee and Hardy, Documents Illustrative of English Church History. 



CHAPTER V 

JOHN WYCLIFFE AND THE CHURCH 

Though there were many critics of the abuses in the Church 
during the Middle Ages, John Wycliffe differed from them in being 
revolutionary in matters of religious doctrine. He has long been 
regarded as the precursor of the Reformation in England; but it 
now seems tolerably certain that his doctrines found no considerable 
acceptance among the people of England at the opening of the 
sixteenth century. Indeed, the thoroughness with which his influ- 
ence was checked is remarkable, especially when his widespread 
activities, the volume of his writings, and the determination of his 
followers are taken into consideration. It constitutes an interesting 
psychological problem just why this was so, in view of the develop- 
ments a century and a half later. Great light will be thrown upon 
this problem by studying the conditions of the continental Church 
which for a time furthered his revolt, and also the causes for the 
strength of the Church in England at the close of the fourteenth 
century. 

§ i. Outline of Wycliffe' s Life 1 

Wycliffe was of North English parentage, and was born about 
1320 in the Richmond district of Yorkshire. He was sent to Ox- 
ford, but when and how is unknown; the attractions of an intel- 
lectual life kept him at the University, where he passed through 
many grades and offices, and took his share both in the teaching 
and administration of the place. He was once Master of Balliol ; 
he was perhaps Warden of Canterbury Hall. His reputation as a 
theologian increased gradually, but until he was some fifty years 
of age it was an Oxford reputation only. It is impossible to say 

1 Trevelyan, England in the Age of Wycliffe, pp. 169 ff. By permission 
of G. M. Trevelyan, Esq., and Messrs. Longmans, Green & Companv 
Publishers. 

221 



222 English Historians 

whether he resided all the year round, or all years together, at 
the University: From 1363 onwards he held livings in the country, 
though never more than one at a time. 

In 1374 he finally received from the crown the rectory of Lut- 
terworth, with which his name is forever connected. There he 
lived continuously after his expulsion from Oxford in 1382; there 
he wrote his later works and collected his friends and mission- 
aries. The Leicestershire village became the centre of a religious 
movement. Owing to the difficulty of ascertaining the exact 
dates of his different books and pamphlets, it would be hard to 
distinguish between those of his theories which issued from Oxford 
and those which first appeared at Lutterworth. There is no need 
in a general history of the times to attempt the difficult task of 
exact chronological division, such as would be necessary in a 
biography of Wycliffe. It is enough to know that his demand 
for disendowment preceded his purely doctrinal heresies; that 
his quarrel with the friars came to a head just before his denial 
of transubstantiation in 1380, while his attack on the whole organi- 
zation and the most prominent doctrines of the mediaeval Church 
is found in its fulness only in his later works. 

§ 2. Scholasticism and Wycliffe' s Mental Attitude 

The method by which he arrived at his conclusions was in ap- 
pearance the scholastic method then recognized. Without such a 
basis his theories would have been treated with ridicule by all 
theologians, and he would have been as much out of place at Ox- 
ford as Voltaire in the Sorbonne. The system of argument, which 
makes his Latin writings unreadable in the nineteenth century, 
made them formidable in the fourteenth. And yet, essentially, 
he was not an academician. Instinct and feeling were the true 
guides of his mind, not the close reasoning by which he conceived 
that he was irresistibly led to inevitable conclusions. The doc- 
trines of Protestantism, and the conception of a new relation 
between Church and State, were not really the deductions of any 
cut-and-dried dialectic. The one important inclination that he 
derived from scholasticism was the tendency, shared with all 
mediaeval thinkers, to carry his theories to their furthest logical 
point. Hence he was rather a radical than a moderate reformer. 
This uncompromising attitude of mind assigned to him his true 
function. 

He was not the leader of a political party trying to carry through 



John WyclifFe and the Church 223 

the modicum of reform practical at the moment; but a private 
individual trying to spread new ideas and to begin a movement 
of thought which should bear fruit in ages to come. His later 
writings show that he had ceased to regard himself as a "serious 
politician " ; perhaps he was dimly aware that he was something 
greater. He did well, both for himself and the world, to throw 
aside all hopes of immediate success and speak out the truth that 
was in him without counting the cost. But his greatest admirers 
must admit that in some cases his logic drove him to give unwise 
and impossible advice. Some will think his recommendation of 
complete disendowment and the voluntary system to be little better ^ 
and all will probably agree that his proposal to include the uni- 
versities in this scheme was unnecessary. But as they were then 
part of the Church, he did not see how it was consistent with his 
logic that they should continue to hold endowments of land and 
appropriated tithes. 

§ 3. Development of Wycliffe's Doctrines 

In the same way, he carried to an equally extravagant length his 
theory that the life of the priest should be purely spiritual. To 
spiritualize the occupations of the clergy was a very desirable reform 
at this time, but there was no need that Wycliffe should therefore 
wish to restrict their studies to theology. His objection to the 
attendance of clergy at lectures on law and physical science was, 
beyond doubt, a step in the wrong direction. He was confirmed 
in this error by his belief in the all-sufficiency of the Bible. "This 
lore that Christ taught us is enough for this life," he says, "and 
other lore, and more, over this, would Christ that were suspended." 
Learned as he was himself, he affected to depreciate earthly learn- 
ing. But while such extravagances detract somewhat from his 
greatness, as they certainly detracted from his usefulness, they 
cannot be held, as his enemies hold them, to be the principal part 
of his legacy to mankind. True genius nearly always pays the 
price of originality and inventive power, in mistakes proportion- 
ately great. 

In his political ideas regarding the Church, Wycliffe was one 
of a school. Continental and English writers had already for a 
century been theorizing against the secular power of ecclesiastics. 
The Papal Bull of 1377 had likened Wycliffe's early heresies to the 
"perverse opinions and unlearned learning of Marsiglio of Padua 
of damned memory." who had demanded that the Church should 



224 English Historians 

be confined to her spiritual province, and had attacked the 
"Caesarean clergy." 

Wycliffe himself recognized Occam as his master, for his great 
fellow-countryman had more than fifty years back declared it the 
duty of priests to live in poverty, and had maintained with his 
pen the power of the secular State against the pope. It was by 
the spiritual Franciscans, " those evangelical men," as Wycliffe 
called them, "very dear to God," that the poverty ordered by the 
Gospel had been chiefly practised and preached as an example 
for the whole Church. 

On the other hand, it was to their enemy Fitz Ralph, Bishop of 
Armagh, that he owed his doctrine of "dominion." Grossetete, 
the reforming bishop of Lincoln, had in his day attacked pluralities 
and opposed the abuses of papal power in England. Wycliffe not 
only spoke of him with respect and admiration, but again and 
again quoted his words and advanced his opinions as authoritative. 
But while these predecessors had dealt with one or two points only, 
Wycliffe dealt with religion as a whole. Besides the political 
proposals of Occam and Marsiglio, he sketched out a new religion 
which included their proposed changes as part only of the new 
ideas respecting the relations of man to God. 

In this field of doctrine and religion he was himself the originator 
of a school. His authorities, his teachers, were not the thinkers 
of his own century, but the fathers of the early Church. Few, 
perhaps, of his ideas were new in the sense that they had never 
before been conceived by man. But many were absolutely new 
to his age. In those days there was no scientific knowledge of the 
past, and mere tradition can be soon altered. 

If the Catholic faith of the tenth century had been modified, 
no one in the fourteenth would have known that any such change 
had taken place. Even the memory of the Albigenses and their 
terrible fate seems to have vanished, or to have survived only as 
a tale that is told. They are not mentioned in Wycliffe's 
writings. He did not borrow his heresies from them, as the 
Hussites borrowed from him. Wycliffe's restatements, if such 
they were, were therefore to all intents and purposes discov- 
eries. The doctrine of transubstantiation had not always been 
held by the Church, but it had been held for many generations 
when it was denied by Wycliffe. His declaration that his own 
view had been the orthodox faith for "the thousand years that 
Satan was bound," was of little meaning to the unlearned and 
unimaginative. 



John Wycliffe and the Church 225 



§ 4. The Doctrine oj Trans ubstantiation 

He developed this famous heresy in 1379 and 1380, during the 
latter part of his residence at Oxford. He had previously believed 
in the great miracle, but was led into his new position, he declares, 
by the metaphysical consideration of the impossibility of accidents 
existing without substance. This may well be true ; the terms are 
a philosophical way of stating the plain man's difficulties. But 
there were many other considerations besides metaphysical argu- 
ments which influenced his judgment. Transubstantiation was 
unsuited to the general character of his mind, which always found 
difficulty in attributing very high sacredness to particles of matter. 
Thus he complained that the orthodox view of the Eucharist was 
a cause of idolatry, that the people made the host their God. 

Ever since his day the question has been the shibboleth dividing 
off those who revolt against materialized objects of reverence and 
worship from those to whom the materialization gives no offence. 
Neither was Wycliffe blind to the use made of the theory of tran- 
substantiation by the priests, and still more by the friars, to secure 
the veneration and obedience of those to whom they ministered. 
He declared that nothing was more horrible to him than the idea 
that every celebrating priest made the body of Christ; the mass 
was a false miracle invented for mundane purposes. It is now 
acknowledged that the power of the clergy is strongest with those 
peoples who believe in transubstantiation. Even in the fourteenth 
century the Church recognized that her position depended on the 
doctrine. 

Whether Wycliffe knew what a storm he was about to raise, it is 
impossible to say. At any rate, the storm arose at once, and he 
never for an instant shrank from its fury. John of Gaunt hurried 
down in person to Oxford, and ordered him to be silent on the 
question. Such vigorous action shows not only what importance 
the duke attached to his ally, but the alarm with which he regarded 
heresy about the mass. The way was now divided before Wycliffe, 
and he had to make his choice. By a sacrifice of principle he 
would have become the bond-slave of a discredited political party, 
but he would have remained at Oxford safe from all annoyance by 
the Church, under the patronage and occasionally in the employ- 
ment of the State ; by doing the duty which lay before him with- 
out consideration of consequence, he sacrificed the Lancastrian 
alliance, he threw away the protection of the government, he put 
Q 



226 English Historians 

himself at the mercy of the bishops, he was driven from Oxford ; 
he ceased to have an honored position in high circles, to be spoken 
of with respect by great friends and recognition by great enemies. 

The hopes and schemes of the last ten years vanished. By his 
refusal to obey the duke he entered finally on the new life into 
which he had been gradually drifting for some time past, — the life 
of the enthusiast who builds for the future and not for the present, 
with the arm of the spirit and not with the arm of the flesh. Such 
a choice was not so hard for Wycliffe as it has often proved for 
others. He was no sensitive Erasmus. Proud and ascetic, he 
had ever despised the things of this world. A man of war from 
his youth up, the truth was always more to him than peace. He 
refused to be silent on the dangerous subject, and John of Gaunt 
retired from Oxford baffled. It would be interesting to know what 
thoughts were uppermost in the duke's mind as he rode out of the 
town after this memorable interview. 

Although, in arguing against the orthodox view of the Real 
Presence, Wycliffe put forward forcibly, and even crudely, the 
evidences of the senses, and laid stress on the absurdity of a useless 
miracle performed many times a day, often by the lowest type of 
priest, he never went farther in his depreciation of the sacrament 
than the position generally known as consubstantiation. The 
Eucharist always presented to him a mystery. He believed the 
body was in some manner present, though how he did not clearly 
know; he was only certain that bread was present also. 

§ 5. Wycliffe and Other Ecclesiastical Doctrines and Practices 

With regard to the other sacraments, Wycliffe depreciated the 
importance then attached to them, though he made an exception 
in favor of matrimony. He himself did not propose to reduce 
their number, although the change effected by the Protestants of a 
later age was in perfect accord with his principles. It is unneces- 
sary again to point out how 7 very different was his view of penance, 
extreme unction, and holy orders from that of the Catholic 
Church. We find, in Waldensis's confutation of Lollardry that, 
as we should suppose from a perusal of Wycliffe's own works, the 
distinguishing feature of the sect was a depreciation of the miracu- 
lous power of the church sacraments, and the peculiar saving 
qualities of ceremonies, prayers, and pardons. Wycliffe pointed 
out that there was another road to salvation, — a godly life. He 
thought the religious world had been led astray, and in pursuit of 



John Wycliffe and the Church 227 

formulas was forgetting the essence of Christianity. The direct rela- 
tion of the individual to God without these interventions was the 
positive result of his negative criticism. This idea seems to form 
the basis of all his objections and of all his scepticism. This was 
the centre of a rather unsystematized crowd of thoughts which he 
threw out on the world, which have sometimes been regarded as 
detached and chaotic. 

The same principle appears in his attitude towards church 
services. The degree to which a rite increased the real devotion of 
the people was, he declared, the test of its propriety. He found 
that intoning and elaborate singing took the mind off the meaning 
of the prayer. He quoted St. Augustine's dictum "as oft as the 
song delighteth me more than that is songen, so oft I acknowl- 
edge I trespass grievously." This became a favorite text with 
his followers. By the same standard, he judged that the splendid 
building and gaudy decoration of churches drew away the minds 
of the worshippers. In that age, whatever deterioration there might 
be in other spheres of ecclesiastical activity, the unbroken but 
progressive tradition of Gothic architecture still continued to fill 
the country with achievements as noble as any that the art of man 
has accomplished. The simple magnificence of the Early English 
style was being gradually modified, so as to exhibit larger quantities 
of delicate tracery. At the same time the church services, in the 
hands of armies of choristers and chantry priests, were being 
adorned by music more difficult and by intoning more elaborate 
than the old Gregorian chants. 

But what were these new beauties to the class of men who find 
no reality of worship under such forms, and who require some- 
thing altogether different by way of religion ? To their needs and 
thoughts Wycliffe gave expression in language which, compared to 
his language on some other subjects, is extremely moderate. But 
his demand was distinct, and it was founded on a want deeply 
felt by many of his countrymen. We are not surprised to find that 
the Lollards in the next generation found no comfort in the ser- 
vices of the Church, and for lack of conventicles "met in caves and 
woods." A distinctive character was thus given to the worship 
of the new English heretics ; it was a worship essentially Protestant, 
and did not depend for its performance on priest or Church. 

Although we have no account of the meetings of these first non- 
conformists, their character can be gathered from the writings 
of Wycliffe and his followers, who again and again insist on the 
greater importance of preaching and the smaller importance of 



228 English Historians 

ceremonies. Preaching, they declared, was the first duty of clergy- 
men, and of more benefit to the laity than any sacrament. The 
sermon was the special weapon of the early reformers ; it was the 
distinguishing mark of Wycliffe's poor priests. Their chief rivals 
in this art, as in everything else, were the friars, of whose sermons 
there were always enough and to spare. But Wycliffe accused the 
friars of preaching to amuse men and to win their money, making 
up for want of real earnestness by telling stories more popular 
than edifying. He wanted an entirely different class of preacher, 
one who should call people to repentance, and make the sermon 
the great instrument for reformation of life and manners. To 
Wycliffe preaching seemed the most effectual means by which to 
arouse men to a sense of their personal relation to God, and of the 
consequent importance of their every action. Absolution, masses, 
pardons, and penance commuted for money were so many ways of 
keeping all real feeling of responsibility out of the mind. "To 
preach to edifying" became the care of the Lollards, in the place 
of ceremonies and rituals. . . . 

He regarded the Virgin Mary in a spirit halfway between the 
Mariolatry of his contemporaries and the fierce anger with which 
Knox threw her image into the waters as a "painted bred." He 
has left us an interesting treatise entitled Ave Maria, in which 
he holds up her life as an example to all, and especially to women, 
in language full of sympathy and beauty. But he does not advise 
people to pray to her. He does not speak either in praise or con- 
demnation of the images of the Virgin, which then looked down 
from every church in the land. 

Although he did not generally indulge in tirades against idolatry, 
he mentions the mistaken worship of images as part of other super- 
stitious practices attaching to the popular cultus of saints ; he puts 
it on the same footing as the foolish adoration of relics, the costly 
decoration of shrines, and other ways in which pilgrims wasted 
their time and money. Wycliffe was not the first or only man of his 
time in England to be shocked by these practices. Langland, 
whose Piers Plowman was generally read among all classes ten 
or twenty years before the rise of Lollardry, had in that great 
work spoken even more severely of the popular religion, and used 
the word idolatry more freely than Wycliffe. Chaucer's gorge 
rose at the Pardoner and his relics of "pigge's bones." The im- 
pulse that Wycliffe gave was therefore welcome to many, and was 
eagerly followed by the Lollards, who soon became more distinctly 
iconoclastic than their founder, and regarded saints, saints' days. 



John Wycliffe and the Church dig 

and saint-worship with a horror which he never expressed. But 
his other doctrines of the relation of man to God and of man to the 
Church, his new ideas of pardon and absolution, were the only- 
effective engine for the destruction of those abuses and vulgarities 
which Langland and Chaucer vainly deprecated. 

Against the persons and classes who lived by encouraging 
superstition, Wycliffe waged implacable war. He recognized that 
as long as the orders of friars existed in England it would always be 
hard to fight against the practices and beliefs which they taught. 
His views on monks and on bishops, respectively, were much the 
same. His objections to them all were founded on the belief 
that they were the real props of all he sought to destroy, the sworn 
enemies of all he sought to introduce. After his quarrel with the 
friars, he put these thoughts into a definite formula. All men, he 
declared, belonged, or ought to belong, to the "sect of Christ," and 
to that alone. The distinguishing mark of the members was the 
practice of Christian virtues in ordinary life, whether by priest 
or layman. The body had therefore its rule, the Christian code of 
morality. He found, he said, no warrant in Scripture to justify 
any man in binding himself by another code of religious rules, or 
becoming a member of any new sect. Yet that, he said, was what 
the monks and friars had done. They claimed to be "the reli- 
gious, " more dear to God than other men. But their rule was of 
earthly making, the work of Benedict, or Francis, not of Christ; 
there was really only one rule of life, and that was binding on all 
Christians equally. Religion did not consist in peculiar rites dis- 
tinguishing some men from others. Wycliffe affected also to 
regard the worldly prelates and clergy, who held secular office and 
secular property, as another "sect." The pretensions and self- 
interest of the Church, and the intense party spirit actuating the 
authorities, gave a certain meaning to the word. A powerful and 
jealous organization, dangerous to the State as well as fatal to 
individual freedom of religious practice, was very far from that 
idea of the Church which Wycliffe thought he found in the histories 
of the early Christian community. . . . 

The pope had no place in Wycliffe's free Church of all Christian 
men. "If thou say that Christ's Church must have a head here on 
earth, sooth it is, for Christ is head, that must be here with his 
Church until the day of doom." This complete repudiation of 
papal authority was the last stage of a long process. Until the 
time of the schism he had done no more than state the fallibility 
cf the pope, and expose papal deviations from the "law of God." 



230 English Historians 

When in 1378 his enemy and persecutor Gregory the Eleventh 
died, he welcomed the accession of Urban the Sixth, and hoped to 
see in him a reforming head of Christendom. He was soon dis- 
appointed. The anti-pope Clement was set up at Avignon, and 
gods and men were edified by the spectacle of the two successors 
of St. Peter issuing excommunications and raising armies against 
each other. Then, and not till then, Wycliffe denied all papal 
power over the Church. 

The positive basis which Wycliffe set up, in place of absolute 
church authority, was the Bible. We find exactly the same de- 
votion to the literal text in Wycliffe and his followers as among 
the later Puritans. He even declared that it was our only ground 
for belief in Christ. Without this positive basis, the struggle against 
Romanism could never have met with the partial success that event- 
ually attended it. 

As for a new scheme of church government, Wycliffe cannot be 
said to have put one forward. He pleaded for greater simplicity 
of organization, greater freedom of the individual, and less crush- 
ing authority. As his object was to free those laymen and parsons 
who were of his way of thinking from the control of the pope and 
bishops, he proposed to abolish the existing forms of church gov- 
ernment. But he never devised any other machinery, such as a 
presbytery, to take their place. The time had not come for definite 
schemes, such as were possible and necessary in the days of Luther, 
Calvin, and Cranmer, for success was not even distantly in sight. 
The position of the Lollards was anomalous, standing half inside 
and half outside the Church. 

Bibliographical Note 

Loserth, The Beginnings of Wyclifs Activity in Ecclesiastical Politics 
in the English Historical Review, 1896, pp. 319 ff. Lechler, Life of John 
Wyclif. Capes, History of the English Church in the Fourteenth and 
Fifteenth Centuries. Gee and Hardy, Documents Illustrative of English 
Church History. 



PART IV 

THE TUDOR AGE 

CHAPTER I 

THE NEW LEARNING — ERASMUS AND MORE 

The development of Tudor absolutism after the battle of 
Bosworth helped to direct into, peaceful channels the forces 
which had been wasted and checked by feudal and dynastic 
conflicts. The rapid expansion of ocean trade gave the requi- 
site opportunities for the numerical increase of the trading and 
industrial classes, and the correlated classes such as the lawyers. 
The introduction of the printing-press stimulated intellectual ac- 
tivity which quickly widened the range of man's interests and 
speculations. This general European awakening was represented 
in England by many distinguished men, among whom Colet, More, 
Grocyn, and Linacre stand out most prominently. With this 
group is often associated Erasmus who, though born at Rotter- 
dam, was cosmopolitan by nature and spent some time in England. 
Several of these men of letters while loyal to the authority of the 
Church Universal were keenly alive to many existing abuses in 
Church and State, and in two famous works, the Praise of Folly 
and the Utopia, Erasmus and More gave free swing to the spirit 
of criticism. Of these two books, Seebohm, in his Oxford Re- 
formers, gives an entertaining account. 

§ i. Erasmus Writes the "Praise of Folly'''' While Resting 
at M ore's House (1510 or 151 1) 1 

To beguile his time, Erasmus took pen and paper, and began to 

1 Seebohm, The Oxford Reformers, 3d edition, pp. 192 ff. and 346 ff. By 
permission of Frederick Seebohm, Esq., and Messrs. Longmans, Green, & 
Company, Publishers. 

231 



232 English Historians 

write down at his leisure the satirical reflections on men and things 
which, as already mentioned, had grown up within him during his 
recent travels, and served to beguile the tedium of his journey 
from Italy to England. It was not done with any grave design 
or any view of publication ; but he knew his friend More was 
fond of a joke, and he wanted something to do to take his atten- 
tion from the weariness of the pain which he was suffering. So 
he worked away at his manuscript. One day when More came 
home from business, bringing a friend or two with him, Erasmus 
brought it out for their amusement. The fun would be so much 
the greater, he thought, when shared by several together. He had 
fancied Folly putting on her cap and bells, mounting her rostrum, 
and delivering an address to her votaries on the affairs of man- 
kind. These few select friends having heard what he had al- 
ready written, were so delighted with it that they insisted on 
its being completed. In about a week the whole was finished. 
This is the simple history of the Praise of Folly. 

§ 2. Grammarians and the Scholastic System 

It was a satire upon follies of all kinds. The bookworm was 
smiled at for his lantern jaws and sickly look ; the sportsman for 
his love of butchery; the superstitious were sneered at for at- 
tributing strange virtues to images and shrines, for worshipping 
another Hercules under the name of St. George, for going on pil- 
grimage when their proper duty was at home. The wickedness 
of fictitious pardons and the sale of indulgences, the folly of prayers 
to the Virgin in shipwreck or distress, received each a passing 
censure. 

Grammarians were singled out of the regiment of fools as the 
most servile votaries of folly. They were described as "a race of 
men the most miserable, who grow old in penury and filth in their 
schools — schools, did I say ? prisons ! dungeons ! I should have 
said — among their boys, deafened with din, poisoned by a fetid 
atmosphere, but, thanks to their folly, perfectly self-satisfied, 
so long as they can bawl and shout to their terrified boys, and box 
and beat and flog them, and so indulge in all kinds of ways their 
cruel disposition." 

After criticising with less severity poets and authors, rhetoricians 
and lawyers, Folly proceeded to reecho the censure of Colet upon 
the dogmatic system of the Schoolmen. 

She ridiculed the logical subtlety which spent itself on splitting 



The New Learning — Erasmus and More 1^2 

hairs and disputing about nothing, and to which the modern fol- 
lowers of the Schoolmen were so painfully addicted. She ridi- 
culed, too, the prevalent dogmatic philosophy and science, which 
having been embraced by the Schoolmen and sanctioned by ec- 
clesiastical authority, had become a part of the scholastic 
system. "With what ease do they dream and prate of the crea- 
tion of innumerable worlds; measuring sun, moon, stars, and 
earth as though by a thumb and thread; rendering a reason for 
thunder, wind, eclipse, and other inexplicable things ; never hesi- 
tating in the least, just as though they had been admitted into 
the secrets of creation, or as though they had come down to us from 
the council of the Gods — with whom, and whose conjectures, 
Nature is mightily amused ! " 

§ 3. Scholastic Theology and Foolish Questions 

From dogmatic science Folly turned at once to dogmatic the- 
ology, and proceeded to comment in her severest fashion on a class 
whom, she observes, it might have been safest to pass over in 
silence — divines. "Their pride and irritability are such (she 
said) that they will come down upon me with their six hundred con- 
clusions, and compel me to recant ; and, if I refuse, declare me a 
heretic forthwith. . . . They explain to their own satisfaction the 
most hidden mysteries: how the universe was constructed and 
arranged — through what channels the stain of original sin de- 
scends to posterity — how the miraculous birth of Christ was 
effected — how in the Eucharist wafer the accidents can exist 
without a substance, and so forth. And they think themselves 
equal to the solution of such questions as these: Whether . . . 
God could have taken upon himself the nature of a woman, a devil, 
an ass, a gourd, or a stone? And how in that case a gourd could 
have preached, worked miracles, and been nailed to the cross? 
What Peter would have consecrated if he had consecrated the 
Eucharist at the moment that the body of Christ was hanging upon 
the Cross ? Whether at that moment Christ could have been called 
a man ? Whether we shall eat and drink after the resurrection ? " 
In a later edition, Folly is made to say further: "These School- 
men possess such learning and subtlety that I fancy even the 
Apostles themselves would need another Spirit, if they had to 
engage with this new race of divines about questions of this 
kind." . . . 

After pursuing the subject further, Folly suggests that an army 



234 English Historians 

of them should be sent against the Turks, not in the hope that the 
Turks might be converted by them so much as that Christendom 
would be relieved by their absence, and then she is made quietly 
to say: "You may think all this is said in joke, but seriously, 
there are some, even amongst divines themselves, versed in better 
learning, who are disgusted at these (as they think) frivolous subtle- 
ties of divines. There are some who execrate, as a kind of sacri- 
lege, and consider as the greatest impiety these attempts to dispute 
with unhallowed lips and profane arguments about things so holy 
that they should rather be adored than explained, to define them 
with so much presumption, and to pollute the majesty of divine 
theology with cold, yea and sordid, words and thoughts. But, 
in spite of these, with the greatest self-complacency divines go on 
spending night and day over their foolish studies, so that they never 
have anv leisure left for the perusal of the gospels, or the epistles 
of St. Paul." 

Finally, Folly exclaims, "Are they not the most happy of men 
whilst they are treating of these things? whilst describing every- 
thing in the infernal regions as exactly as though they had lived 
there for years ? whilst creating new spheres at pleasure, one, the 
largest and most beautiful, being finally added, that, forsooth, 
happy spirits might have room enough to take a walk, to spread 
their feasts, or to play at ball?" ... 

Monks came in for at least as rough a handling. There is 
perhaps no more severe and powerful passage anywhere in the 
whole book than that in which Folly is made to draw a picture of 
their appearance on the Judgment Day, finding themselves with 
the goats on the left hand of the Judge, pleading hard their rigor- 
ous observance of the rules and ceremonies of their respective 
orders, but interrupted by the solemn question from the Judge: 
"Whence this race of new Jews? I know onlypf one law which is 
really mine; but of that I hear nothing at all. When on earth, 
without mystery or parable, I openly promised my Father's in- 
heritance, not to cowls, matins, or fastings, but to the practice 
of faith and charity. I know you not, ye who know nothing 
but your own works. Let those who wish to be thought more holy 
than I am inhabit their newly discovered heavens ; and let those 
who prefer their own traditions to my precepts, order new ones to 
be built for them." When they shall hear this (continues Folly), 
"and see sailors and wagoners preferred to themselves, how do 
you think they will look upon each other ? " 



The New Learning — Erasmus and More 235 



§ 4. Folly on Kings, Princes, and the Pope 

Kings, princes, and courtiers next pass under review, and here 
again may be traced that firm attitude of resistance to royal tyr- 
anny which has already been marked in the conduct of More. 
If More in his congratulatory verses took the opportunity of pub- 
licly asserting his love of freedom and hatred of tyranny in the ears 
of the new king, his own personal friend, as he mounted the throne, 
so Erasmus also, although come back to England full of hope that 
in Henry VIII he might find a patron, not only of learning in gen- 
eral but of himself in particular, took this opportunity of putting 
into the mouth of Folly a similar assertion of the sacred rights of 
the people and the duties of a king : — 

"It is the duty (she suggests) of a true prince to seek the public 
and not his own private advantage. From the laws, of which he 
is both the author and executive magistrate, he must not himself 
deviate by a finger's breadth. He is responsible for the integrity 
of his officials and magistrates. . . . But (continues Folly) by my 
aid princes cast such cares as these to the winds, and care only for 
their own pleasure. . . . They think they fill their position well 
if they hunt with diligence, if they keep good horses, if they make 
gain to themselves by the sale of offices and places, if they can daily 
devise new means of undermining the wealth of citizens, and raking 
it into their own exchequer, disguising the iniquity of such pro- 
ceedings by some specious pretence and show of legality." 

If the memory of Henry VII was fresh in the minds of More and 
Erasmus, so also his courtiers and tools, of whom Empson and 
Dudley were the recognized types, were not forgotten. The cring- 
ing, servile, abject, and luxurious habits of courtiers were fair 
game for Folly. 

From this cutting review of kings, princes, and courtiers, the 
satire, taking a still bolder flight, at length swooped down to fix 
its talons in the very flesh of the pope himself. 

The Oxford friends had some personal knowledge of Rome and 
her pontiffs. When Colet was in Italy, the notoriously wicked 
Alexander VI was pope, and what Colet thought of him has been 
mentioned. While Erasmus was in Italy, Julius II was pope. 
He had succeeded to the papal chair in 1503. 

Julius II, in the words of Ranke, " devoted himself to the grati- 
fication of that innate love of war and conquest which was in- 
deed the ruling passion of his life. ... It was the ambition of 



1^6 English Historians 

Julius II to extend the dominions of the Church. He must there- 
fore be regarded as the founder of the Papal States. " Erasmus, dur- 
ing his recent visit, had himself been driven from Bologna when it 
was besieged by the Roman army, led by Julius in person. He had 
written from Italy that "literature was giving place to war, that 
Pope Julius was warring, conquering, triumphing, and openly act- 
ing the Caesar." Mark how aptly and boldly he now hit off his 
character in strict accordance with the verdict of history, when in 
the course of his satire he came to speak of popes. Folly dryly 
observes that, "Although in the gospel Peter is said to have de- 
clared, 'Lo, we have left all, and followed thee,' yet these popes 
speak of 'St. Peter's patrimony' as consisting of lands, towns, 
tributes, customs, lordships; for which, when their zeal for 
Christ is stirred, they fight with fire and sword at the expense of 
much Christian blood, thinking that in doing so they are apostolic 
defenders of Christ's spouse, the Church, from her enemies. As 
though, indeed, there were any enemies of the Church more per- 
nicious than impious popes ! . . . Further, as the Christian 
Church was founded in blood, and confirmed by blood, and ad- 
vanced by blood, now in like manner, as though Christ were dead 
and could no longer defend his own, they take to the sword. And 
although war be a thing so savage that it becomes wild beasts rather 
than men, so frantic that the poets feigned it to be the work of the 
Furies, so pestilent that it blights at once all morality, so unjust 
that it can be best waged by the worst of ruffians, so impious that 
it has nothing in common with Christ, yet to the neglect of every- 
thing else they devote themselves to war alone." 

And this bold satire upon the warlike passions of the pope was 
made still more direct and personal by what followed. To quote 
Ranke once more: "Old as Julius now was, worn by the many 
vicissitudes of good and evil fortune, and most of all by the conse- 
quences of intemperance and licentious excess, in the extremity 
of age he still retained an indomitable spirit. It was from the 
tumults of a general war that he hoped to gain his objects. He 
desired to be the lord and master of the game of the world. In 
furtherance of his grand aim he engaged in the boldest operations, 
risking all to obtain all." Compare with this picture of the old age 
of the warlike pope the following words put by Erasmus into the 
mouth of Folly, and printed and read all over Europe in the life- 
time of Julius himself: — 

"Thus you may see even decrepit old men display all the vigor 
of youth, sparing no cost, shrinking from no toil, stopped by 



The New Learning — Erasmus and More 237 

nothing, if only they can turn law, religion, peace, and all human 
affairs upside down." 

In conclusion, Folly, after pushing her satire in other directions, 
was made to apologize for the bold flight she had taken. If any- 
thing she had said seemed to be spoken with too much loquacity 
or petulance, she begged that it might be remembered that it was 
spoken by Folly. But let it be remembered also, she added, that — 

A fool oft speaks a seasonable truth. 

She then made her bow, and descended the steps of her rostrum, 
bidding her most illustrious votaries farewell, — valete, plaudite, 
vivite, bibitef 

Such was the Praise of Folly, the manuscript of which was 
snatched from Erasmus by More or one of his friends and ulti- 
mately sent over to Paris to be printed there, probably in the sum- 
mer of 1 5 1 1 , and to pass within a few months through no less than 
seven editions. 

§ 5. Preparation of the " Utopia" (15 15) 

It was whilst More's keen eye was anxiously watching the clouds 
gathering upon the political horizon, and during the leisure hours 
snatched from the business of his embassy, that he conceived the 
idea of embodying his notions on social and political questions 
in a description of the imaginary commonwealth of the Island of 
"Utopia" — "Nusquama" — or "Nowhere." 

It does net often happen that two friends, engaged in fellow- 
work, publish in the same year two books, both of which take an 
independent and permanent place in the literature of Europe. But 
this may be said of the Novum Instrumentum of Erasmus and the 
Utopia of More. 

Still more remarkable is it that two such works, written by two 
such men, should, in a measure, be traceable to the influence and 
express the views of a more obscure but greater man than they. 
Yet, in truth, much of the merit of both these works belongs indi- 
rectly to Colet. 

As the Novum Instrumentum upon careful examination proves 
to be the expression, on the part of Erasmus, not merely of his own 
isolated views, but of the views held in common by the little band 
of Oxford Reformers, on the great subject of which it treats, 
so the Utopia will be found to be in great measure the expression, 
on More's part, of the views of the same little band of friends on 



238 English Historians 

social and political questions. On most of these questions Erasmus 
and More, in the main, thought alike ; and they owed much of their 
common convictions indirectly to the influence of Colet. 

The first book of the Utopia was written after the second, under 
circumstances and for reasons which will, in due course, be men- 
tioned. 

The second book was complete in itself and contained the de- 
scription, by Raphael, the supposed traveller, of the Utopian com- 
monwealth. Erasmus informs us that More's intention in writing 
it was to point out where and from what causes European com- 
monwealths were at fault, and he adds that it was written with 
special reference to English politics, with which More. was most 
familiar. 

Whilst, however, we trace its close connection with the political 
events passing at the time in England, it must not be supposed that 
More was so gifted with prescience that he knew what course 
matters would take. He could not know, for instance, that Wol- 
sey was about to take the reins of government so completely into 
his own hands as to dispense with a Parliament for so many years 
to come. As yet, More and his friends, in spite of Wolsey's osten- 
tation and vanity, which they freely ridiculed, had a high opinion of 
his character and powers. It was not unnatural that, knowing 
that Wolsey was a friend to education, and, to some extent at least, 
inclined to patronize the projects of Erasmus, they should hope for 
the best. Hence the satire contained in Utopia was not likely to 
be directed personally against Wolsey, however much his policy 
might come in for its share of criticisms along with the rest. 

The point of the Utopia consisted in the contrast presented by 
its ideal commonwealth to the condition and habits of the European 
commonwealths of the period. This contrast is most often left to 
be drawn by the reader from his own knowledge of contemporary 
politics, and hence the peculiar advantage of the choice by More 
of such a vehicle for the bold satire it contained. Upon any other 
hypothesis than that the evils against which its satire was directed 
were admitted to be real, the romance of Utopia must also be ad- 
mitted to be harmless.- To pronounce it to be dangerous, was to 
admit its truth. 

§ 6. International Policy oj the Utopians 

Take, e.g., the following passage relating to the international 
policy of the Utopians : — 

" While other nations are always entering into leagues, and break- 



The New Learning — Erasmus and More 239 

ing and renewing them, the Utopians never enter into a league with 
any nation. For what is the use of a league ? they say. As though 
there were no natural tie between man and man ! and as though 
any one who despised this natural tie would, forsooth, regard mere 
words ! They hold this opinion all the more strongly, because in 
that quarter of the world the leagues and treaties of princes are not 
observed as faithfully as they should be. For in Europe, and espe- 
ciallv in those parts of it where the Christian faith and religion 
are professed, the sanctity of leagues is held sacred and inviolate; 
partly owing to the justice and goodness of princes, and partly 
from their fear and reverence of the authority of the popes, who, 
as they themselves never enter into obligations which they do not 
most religiously perform [ !], command other princes under all 
circumstances to abide by their promises, and punish delinquents 
by pastoral censure and discipline. For, indeed, with good reason, 
it would be thought a most scandalous thing for those whose pecul- 
iar designation is ' the faithful,' to be wanting in the faithful ob- 
servance of treaties. But in those distant regions ... no faith is 
to be placed in leagues, even though confirmed by the most solemn 
ceremonies. Some flaw is easily found in their wording which is 
intentionally made ambiguous so as to leave a loophole through 
which the parties may break both their league and their faith. 
Which craft — yes, fraud and deceit — if it were perpetrated with 
respect to a contract between private parties, they would indig- 
nantly denounce as sacrilege and deserving the gallows, whilst 
those who suggest these very things to princes, glory in being the 
authors of them. Whence it comes to pass that justice seems alto- 
gether a plebeian and vulgar virtue, quite below the dignity of 
royalty; or at least there must be two kinds of it, the one for com- 
mon people and the poor, very narrow and contracted ; the other, 
the virtue of princes, much more dignified and free, so that that 
only is unlawful to them which they don't like. The morals of 
princes being such in that region, it is not, I think, without reason 
that the Utopians enter into no leagues at all. Perhaps they 
would alter their opinion if they lived amongst us." 

Read without reference to the international history of the period 
these passages appear perfectly harmless. But read in the light 
of that political history which, during the past few years, had 
become so mixed up with the personal history of the Oxford 
Reformers, recollecting " how religiously" treaties had been made 
and broken by almost every sovereign in Europe, — Henry VIII 
and the pope included, — the words in which the justice and 



240 English Historians 

goodness of European princes are so mildly and modestly extolled 
become almost as bitter in their tone as the cutting censure of 
Erasmus in the Praise oj Folly, or his more recent and open 
satire upon kings. 

Again, bearing in mind the wars of Henry VIII, and how evi- 
dently the love of military glory was the motive which induced him 
to engage in them, the following passage contains almost as direct 
and pointed a censure of the king's passion for war as the sermon 
preached by Colet in his presence: — 

"The Utopians hate war as plainly brutal, although practised 
more eagerly by man than by any other animal. And contrary 
to the sentiment of nearly every other nation, they regard nothing 
more inglorious than glory derived from war." 

§ 7. Government a Conspiracy oj the Rich against the Poor 

Turning from international politics to questions of internal pol- 
icy, and bearing in mind the hint of Erasmus, that More had in 
view chiefly the politics of his own country, it is impossible not to 
recognize in the Utopia the expression again and again of the 
sense of wrong stirred up in More's heart as he had witnessed 
how every interest of the commonwealth had been sacrificed to 
Henry VIII's passion for war ; and how, in sharing the burdens it 
entailed, and dealing with the social evils it brought to the surface, 
the interests of the poor had been sacrificed to spare the pockets 
of the rich; how, whilst the very wages of the laborer had been 
taxed to support the long-continued war expenditure, a selfish 
Parliament, under color of the old "statutes of laborers," had at- 
tempted to cut down the amount of his wages, and to rob him of 
that fair rise in the price of his labor which the drain upon the 
labor market had produced. 

It is impossible not to recognize that the recent statutes of la- 
borers were the target against which More's satire was specially 
directed in the following paragraph: — 

"Let any one dare to compare with the even justice which rules 
in Utopia, the justice of other nations; amongst whom let me die, 
if I find any trace at all of equity and justice. For where is the 
justice, that noblemen, goldsmiths, and usurers, and those classes 
who either do nothing at all, or, in whatever they do, are of no great 
service to the commonwealth, should live a genteel and splendid 
life in idleness or unproductive labor, whilst in the meantime the 
servant, the wagoner, the mechanic, and the peasant, toiling almost 



The New Learning — Erasmus and More 241 

longer and harder than the horse, in labor so necessary that no com- 
monwealth could endure a year without it, lead a life so wretched 
that the condition of the horse seems more to be envied, his labor 
being less constant, his food more delicious to his palate, and his 
mind disturbed by no fears for the future ? . . . 

"Is not that republic unjust and ungrateful which confers such 
benefits upon the gentry (as they are called) and goldsmiths and 
others of that class, whilst it cares to do nothing at all for the benefit 
of peasants, colliers, wagoners, servants, and mechanics, without 
which no republic could exist ? Is not that republic unjust which, 
after these men have spent the springtime of their lives in labor, 
have become burdened with age and disease, and are in want 
of every comfort, unmindful of all their toil, and forgetful of all 
their services, rewards them only by a miserable death ? 

"Worse than all, the rich constantly endeavor to pare away some- 
thing further from the daily wages of the poor, by private fraud, 
and even by public laws, so that the already existing injustice (that 
those from whom the republic derives the most benefit should re- 
ceive the least reward) is made still more unjust through the enact- 
ments of public law ! Thus, after careful reflection, it seems to me, 
as I hope for mercy, that our modern republics are nothing but a 
conspiracy of the rich, pursuing their own selfish interests under 
the name of a republic. They devise and invent all ways and 
means whereby they may, in the first place, secure to themselves 
the possession of what they have amassed by evil means; and, in 
the second place, secure to their own use and profit the work and 
labor of the poor at the lowest possible price. And so soon as the 
rich, in the name of the public (i.e. even in the name of the poor), 
choose to decide that these schemes shall be adopted, then they 
become law ! " 

The whole framework of the Utopian commonwealth bears 
witness to More's conviction, that what should be aimed at in his 
own country and elsewhere, was a true community, not a rich 
and educated aristocracy on the one hand, existing side by side with 
a poor and ignorant peasantry on the other, but one people, 
well-to-do and educated throughout. 

Thus More's opinion was, that in England in his time, "far 
more than four parts of the whole people, divided into ten, could 
never read English," and probably the education of the other six- 
tenths was anything but satisfactory. He shared Colet's faith in 
education, and represented that in Utopia every child was properly 
educated. 



242 English Historians 

Again the great object of the social economy of Utopia was not 
to increase the abundance of luxuries, or to amass a vast accumula- 
tion in few hands, or even in national or royal hands, but to lessen 
the hours of labor to the workingman. By spreading the burden 
of labor more evenly over the whole community, — by taking care 
that there should be no idle classes, be they beggars or begging 
friars, — More expressed the opinion that the hours of labor to 
the workingman might probably be reduced to six. 

Again: living himself in Bucklersbury, in the midst of all the 
dirt and filth of London's narrow streets ; surrounded by the un- 
clean, ill- ventilated houses of the poor, whose floors of clay and 
rushes, never cleansed, were pointed out by Erasmus as breeding 
pestilence and inviting the ravages of the sweating sickness ; him- 
self a commissioner of sewers, and having thus some practical 
knowledge of London's sanitary arrangements, More described 
the towns of Utopia as well and regularly built, with wide streets, 
waterworks, hospitals, and numerous common halls ; all the houses 
well protected from the weather, as nearly as might be fireproof, 
three stories high, with plenty of windows, and doors both front and 
back, the back door always opening into a well-kept garden. All 
this was Utopian, doubtless, and the result in Utopia of the 
still more Utopian abolition of private property; but the gist and 
the point of it consisted in the contrast it presented with what he 
saw around him in Europe, and especially in England, and men 
could hardly fail to draw the lesson he intended to teach. 

It will not be necessary here to dwell further upon the details 
of the social arrangements of More's ideal commonwealth, or to 
enter at length upon the philosophical opinions of the Utopians ; 
but a word or two will be needful to point out the connection of the 
latter. with the views of that little band of friends whose joint his- 
tory I am here trying to trace. 

§ 8. The Religion of Utopia Broad and Tolerant 

From his expression of a fearless faith in the consistency of 
Christianity with science, it might be inferred that More would 
represent the religion of the Utopians as at once broad and tolerant. 
It could not logically be otherwise. The Utopians, we are told, 
differed very widely ; but notwithstanding all their different objects 
of worship, they agreed in thinking that there is one Supreme Being 
who made and governs the world. By the exigencies of the ro- 
mance, the Christian religion had only been recently introduced into 



The New Learning — Erasmus and More 243 

the island. It existed there side by side with other and older reli- 
gions, and hence the difficulties of complete toleration in Utopia 
were much greater hypothetically than they would be in any Euro- 
pean country. Still, sharing Colet's hatred of persecution, More 
represented that it was one of the oldest laws of Utopia "that no 
man is to be punished for his religion." Every one might be of 
any religion he pleased, and might use argument to induce others 
to accept it. It was only when men resorted to other force than that 
of persuasion, using reproaches and violence, that they were ban- 
ished from Utopia ; and then, not on account of their religion, and 
irrespective of whether their religion were true or false, but for 
sowing sedition and creating a tumult. 

This law Utopus founded to preserve the public peace, and for 
the interests of religion itself. Supposing only one religion to be 
true and the rest false (which he dare not rashly assert), Utopus 
had faith that in the long run the innate force of truth would pre- 
vail, if supported only by fair argument, and not damaged by resort 
to violence and tumult. Thus, he did not punish even avowed 
atheists, although he considered them unfit for any public trust. 

Their priests were very few in number of either sex, and, like 
all their other magistrates, elected by ballot (sujfragiis occidtis) ; 
and it was a point of dispute even with the Utopian Christians, 
whether they could not elect their own Christian priests in like 
manner, and qualify them to perform all priestly offices, without 
any apostolic succession or authority from the pope. Their priests 
were, in fact, rather conductors of the public worship, inspectors 
of the public morals, and ministers of education than " priests" 
in any sacerdotal sense of the word. Thus whilst representing 
confession as in common use amongst Utopians, More significantly 
described them as confessing not to the priests but to the heads of 
families. Whilst also, as in Europe, such was the respect shown 
them that they were not amenable to the civil tribunals, it was said 
to be on account of the extreme fewness of their number, and the 
high character secured by their mode of election, that no great in- 
convenience resulted from this exemption in Utopian practice. 

If the diversity of religions in Utopia made it more difficult 
to suppose perfect toleration, and thus madjp the contrast between 
Utopian and European practice in this respect all the more telling, 
so also was this the case in respect to the conduct of public worship. 

The hatred of the Oxford Reformers for the endless dissensions 
of European Christians ; the advice Colet was wont to give to theo- 
logical students, "to keep to the Bible and the Apostles' Creed, 



244 English Historians 

and let divines, if they like, dispute about the rest " ; the appeal of 
Erasmus to Servatius, whether it would not be better for "all 
Christendom to be regarded as one monastery, and all Christians 
as belonging to the same religious brotherhood," — all pointed, if 
directed to the practical question of public worship, to a mode of 
worship in which all of every shade of sentiment could unite. 

This might be a dream even then, while as yet Christendom 
was nominally united in one Catholic Church ; and still more prac- 
tically impossible in a country like Utopia, where men wor- 
shipped the Supreme Being under different symbols and different 
names, as it might be now even in a Protestant country like Eng- 
land, where religion seems to be the source of social divisions and 
castes rather than a tie of brotherhood, separating men in their 
education, in their social life, and even in their graves, by the hard 
line of sectarian difference. It might be a dream, but it was one 
worth a place in the dreamland of More's ideal commonwealth. 

Temples, nobly built and spacious, in whose solemn twilight 
men of all sects meet, in spite of their distinctions, to unite in a pub- 
lic worship avowedly so arranged that nothing may be seen or 
heard which shall jar with the feelings of any class of the worship- 
pers — nothing in which all cannot unite (for every sect performs 
its own peculiarites in private) : no images, so that every one 
may represent the Deity to his own thoughts in his own way ; no 
forms of prayer, but such as every one may use without prejudice 
to his own private opinion — a service so expressive of their 
common brotherhood that they think it a great impiety to enter 
upon it with a consciousness of anger or hatred to any one, with- 
out having first purified their hearts and reconciled every difference ; 
incense and other sweet odors and waxen lights burned, not from 
any notion that they can confer any benefit on God, which even 
men's prayers cannot, but because they are useful aids to the wor- 
shippers ; the men occupying one side of the temple, the women the 
other, and all clothed in white; the whole people rising as the 
priest who conducts the worship enters the temple in his beautiful 
vestments, wonderfully wrought of birds' plumage, to join in 
hymns of praise, accompanied by music ; then priest and people 
uniting in solemn prayer to God in a set form of words, so com- 
posed that each can apply its meaning to himself, offering thanks 
for the blessings which surround them, for the happiness of their 
commonwealth, for their having embraced a religious persuasion 
which they hope is the most true one ; praying that if they are mis- 
taken they may be led to what is really the true one, so that all 






The New Learning — Erasmus and More 245 

may be brought to unity of faith and practice, unless in his inscrut- 
able will the Almighty should otherwise ordain; and concluding 
with a prayer that, as soon as it may please Him, He may take them 
to Himself; lastly, this prayer concluded, the whole congregation 
bowing solemnly to the ground, and then, after a short pause, 
separating to spend the remainder of the day in innocent amuse- 
ment — this was More's idea of public worship ! 

Such was the second book of the Utopia, probably written by 
More whilst on the embassy, toward the close of 151 5, or soon after 
his return. Well might he conclude with the words, "I freely con- 
fess that many things in the commonwealth of Utopia I rather wish 
than hope to see adopted in our own ! " 

Bibliographical Note 

Froude, Life and Letters of Erasmus. Nichols, The Epistles of Erasmus. 
Emerton, Erasmus, especially the chapters relating to his life in England. 
Gasquet, Eve of the Reformation, chap, vi on Erasmus, chap, ii on the re- 
vival of letters, and chap, viii on the English Bible. Roper, Life of Sir 
Thomas More. Lupton, Life of Dean Colet. Einstein, The Italian Re- 
naissance in England, Columbia University Press. The Cambridge Modern 
History, Vol. I, chap, xvi for the classical Renaissance; chap, xvii for the 
Christian Renaissance. 



CHAPTER II 

ON THE EVE OF THE SEPARATION FROM ROME 

The state of religious opinion in England on the eve of the 
separation of the English Church from Roman authority is exceed- 
ingly difficult to determine. It is very hard, indeed, to state even 
the problems to be solved in the ascertainment of that condition. 
There is no way of knowing the number of men who were dissatis- 
fied with the Church or its doctrines. It is often claimed, however, 
that the Church was steadily declining in authority, and that the 
growing dissatisfaction with the prevailing ecclesiastical policy 
would have soon broken England away from the Roman com- 
munion even if Henry VIII had not found an excuse for a quick 
and violent severance of the ancient ties. This view is given in the 
famous History of England by Mr. Froude, from which this extract 
is taken. An examination of the footnotes cited in the original 
volume itself gives an interesting insight into the nature of the 
evidence for the conclusions and into the methods employed by the 
author. 

§ i. Changes Since the Day oj Henry II 1 

Times were changed in England since the second Henry walked 
barefoot through the streets of Canterbury, and knelt while the 
monks flogged him on the pavement in the Chapterhouse, doing 
penance for Becket's murder. The clergy had won the battle in 
the twelfth century because they deserved to win it. They were not 
free from fault and weakness, but they felt the meaning of their 
profession. Their hearts were in their vows ; their authority was 
exercised more justly, more nobly, than the authority of the crown; 
and therefore, with inevitable justice, the crown was compelled to 
stoop before them. The victory was great; but, like many vic- 
tories, it was fatal to the conquerors. It filled them full with the 

1 Froude, History oj England, Vol. I, chap. ii. 
246 



On the Eve of the Separation from Rome 247 

vanity of power; they forgot their duties in their privileges; and 
when a century later the conflict recommenced, the altering issue 
proved the altering nature of the conditions under which it was 
fought. The laity were sustained in vigor by the practical obliga- 
tions of life ; the clergy sank under the influence of a waning reli- 
gion, the administration of the forms of which had become their 
sole occupation ; and as character forsook them, the mortmain act, 
the acts of praemunire, and the repeatedly recurring statutes of 
provisors mark the successive defeats that drove them back from 
the high post of command which character alone had earned for 
them. 

If the Black Prince had lived, or if Richard II had inherited the 
temper of the Plantagenets, the ecclesiastical system would have 
been spared the misfortune of a longer reprieve. Its worst abuses 
would have then terminated, and the reformation of doctrine in the 
sixteenth century would have been left to fight its independent way 
unsupported by the moral corruption of the Church from which it 
received its most powerful impetus. The nation was ready for 
sweeping remedies. The people felt little loyalty to the pope, as 
the language of the statutes of provisors conclusively proves, and 
they were prepared to risk the sacrilege of confiscating the estates 
of the religious houses — a complete measure of secularization 
being then, as I have already said, the expressed desire of the House 
of Commons. With an Edward III on the throne such a measure 
would very likely have been executed, and the course of English 
history would have been changed. It was ordered otherwise, 
and doubtlessly wisely. The Church was allowed a hundred and 
fifty more years to fill full the measure of her offences, that she 
might fall only when time had laid bare the root of her degeneracy, 
and that faith and manners might be changed together. 

§ 2. The Church in the Fifteenth Century 

The history of the time is too imperfect to justify a positive con- 
clusion. It is possible, however, that the success of the revolution 
effected by Henry IV was due in part to a reaction in the Church's 
favor; and it is certain that this prince, if he did not owe his crown 
to the support of the Church, determined to conciliate it. He con- 
firmed the statutes of provisors, but he allowed them to sink into 
disuse. He forbade the further mooting of the confiscation project, 
and to him is due the first permission of the bishops to send heretics 
to the stake. If English tradition is to be trusted, the clergy still 



248 English Historians 

felt insecure ; and the French wars of Henry V are said to have been 
undertaken, as we all know from Shakspeare, at the persuasion of 
Archbishop Chichele, who desired to distract his attention from 
reverting to dangerous subjects. Whether this be true or not, 
no prince of the House of Lancaster betrayed a wish to renew the 
quarrel with the Church. The battle of Agincourt, the conquest 
and reconquest of France, called off the attention of the people; 
while the rise of the Lollards and the intrusion of speculative ques- 
tions, the agitation of which has ever been the chief aversion of 
English statesmen, contributed to change the current; and the re- 
forming spirit must have lulled before the outbreak of the Wars of 
the Roses, or one of the two parties in so desperate a struggle 
would have scarcely failed to have availed themselves of it. Ed- 
ward IV is said to have been lenient toward heresy; but his tolera- 
tion, if it was more than imaginary, was tacit only; he never ven- 
tured to avow it. It is more likely that in the inveterate frenzy 
of those years men had no leisure to remember that heresy existed. 
The clergy were thus left undisturbed to go their own course to 
its natural end. The storm had passed over them without break- 
ing, and they did not dream that it would gather again. The 
immunity which they enjoyed from the general sufferings of the 
civil war contributed to deceive them; and without anxiety for 
the consequences, and forgetting the significant warning which 
they had received, they sank steadily into that condition which is 
inevitable from the constitution of human nature, among men 
without faith, wealthy, powerful, and luxuriously fed, yet con- 
demned to celibacy, and cut off from the common duties and com- 
mon pleasures of ordinary life. On the return of a settled govern- 
ment they were startled for a moment in their security ; the conduct 
of some among them had become so unbearable that even Henry 
VII, who inherited the Lancastrian sympathies, was compelled 
to notice it; and the following brief act was passed by his first 
Parliament, proving by the very terms in which it is couched the 
existing nature of church discipline. "For the more sure and 
likely reformation," it runs, "of priests, clerks, and religious men 
culpable, or by their demerits openly noised of incontinent living 
in their bodies, contrary to their order, be it enacted, ordained, and 
established, that it be lawful to all archbishops and bishops, and 
other ordinaries having episcopal jurisdiction, to punish and chas- 
tise such religious men, being within the bounds of their jurisdic- 
tion, as shall be convict before them, by lawful proof, of adultery, 
fornication, incest, or other fleshly incontinency, by committing 



On the Eve of the Separation from Rome 249 

them to ward and prison, there to remain for such time as shall be 
thought convenient for the quality of their trespasses." 

Previous to the passing of this act, therefore, the bishops, who 
had power to arrest laymen on suspicion of heresy, and detain them 
in prison untried, had no power to imprison priests, even though 
convicted of adultery or incest. The legislature were supported 
by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Cardinal Morton procured 
authority from the pope to visit the religious houses, the abomina- 
tion of which had become notorious; and in a provincial synod 
held on the 24th of February, i486, he laid the condition of the 
secular clergy before the assembled prelates. Many priests, 
it was stated, spent their time in hawking or hunting, in lounging 
at taverns, in the dissolute enjoyment of the world. They wore 
their hair long like laymen ; they were to be seen lounging in the 
streets with cloak and doublet, sword and dagger. By the scandal 
of their lives they imperilled the stability of their order. A num- 
ber of the worst offenders, in London especially, were summoned 
before the synod and admonished; certain of the more zealous 
among the learned (complures docti) who had preached against 
clerical abuses were advised to be more cautious, for the avoiding 
of scandal; but the archbishop, taking the duty upon himself, 
sent round a circular among the clergy of his province exhorting 
them to general amendment. 

Yet this little cloud again disappeared. Henry VII sat too 
insecurely on his throne to venture on a resolute reform, even if his 
feelings had inclined him towards it, which they did not. Morton 
durst not resolutely grapple with the evil. He rebuked and re- 
monstrated; but punishment would have caused a public scandal. 
He would not invite the inspection of the laity into a disease which, 
without their assistance, he had not the strength to encounter, and 
his incipient reformation died away ineffectually in words. The 
Church, to outward appearance, stood more securely than ever. 
The obnoxious statutes of the Plantagenets were in abeyance; 
their very existence, as it seemed, was forgotten; and Thomas 
a Becket never desired more absolute independence for the eccle- 
siastical order than Archbishop Warham found established when 
he succeeded to the primacy. He, too, ventured to repeat the ex- 
periment of his predecessor. In 1511 he attempted a second 
visitation of the monasteries, and again exhorted a reform ; but 
his efforts were even slighter than Morton's, and in their results 
equally without fruit. The maintenance of his order in its polit- 
ical supremacy was of greater moment to him than its moral 



250 English Historians 

purity; a decent veil was cast over the clerical infirmities, and 
their vices were forgotten as soon as they ceased to be proclaimed. 

§ 3. Henry VIII, Wolsey, and the Church 

Henry VIII, a mere boy on his accession, was borne away with 
the prevailing stream; and trained from his childhood by theo- 
logians, he entered upon his reign saturated with theological pre- 
possessions. The intensity of his nature recognizing no half 
measures, he was prepared to make them the law of his life, and 
so zealous was he that it seemed as if the Church had found 
in him a new Alfred or a Charlemagne. Unfortunately for the 
Church, institutions may be restored in theory; but theory, be 
it never so perfect, will not give them back their life ; and Henry 
discovered at length that the Church of the sixteenth century as 
little resembled the Church of the eleventh as Leo X resembled 
Hildebrand, or Warham resembled St. Anselm. 

If, however, there were no longer saints among the clergy, there 
could still arise among them a remarkable man ; and in Cardinal 
Wolsey the king found an adviser who was able to retain him 
longer than would otherwise have been possible in the course 
which he had entered upon; who, holding a middle place between 
an English statesman and a Catholic of the old order, was essen- 
tially a transition minister ; and who was qualified, above all men 
then living, by a combination of talent, honesty, and arrogance, 
to open questions which could not again be closed when they had 
escaped the grasp of their originator. Under Wolsey's influence 
Henry made war with Louis of France, in the pope's quarrel, 
entered the polemic lists with Luther, and persecuted the English 
Protestants. But Wolsey could not blind himself to the true con- 
dition of the Church. He was too wise to be deceived with out- 
ward prosperity; he knew well that there lay before it, in Europe 
and at home, the alternative of ruin or amendment, and therefore 
he familiarized Henry with the sense that a reformation was in- 
evitable, and dreaming that it could be effected from within, by 
the Church itself inspired with a wiser spirit, he himself fell the 
first victim of a convulsion which he had assisted to create, and 
which he attempted too late to stay. 

His intended measures were approaching maturity when all 
Europe was startled by the news that Rome had been stormed by 
the imperial army, that the pope was imprisoned, the churches 
pillaged, the cardinals insulted, and all holiest things polluted 



On the Eve of the Separation from Rome 251 

and profaned. A spectator, judging only by outward symptoms, 
would have seen at that strange crisis in Charles V the worst patron 
of heresy, and the most dangerous enemy of the Holy See; while 
the indignation with which the news of these outrages was received 
at the English court would have taught him to look on Henry 
as the one sovereign in Europe on whom that See might calculate 
most surely for support in its hour of danger. If he could have 
pierced below the surface, he would have found that the pope's 
best friend was the prince who held him prisoner; that Henry 
was but doubtfully acquiescing in the policy of an unpopular 
minister; and that the English nation would have looked on with 
stoical resignation if pope and papacy had been wrecked together. 
They were not inclined to heresy; but the ecclesiastical system 
was not the Catholic faith, and this system, ruined by prosperity, 
was fast pressing its excesses to the extreme limit, beyond which 
it could not be endured. 

Wolsey talked of reformation, but delayed its coming, and in 
the meantime the persons to be reformed showed no fear that it 
would come at all. The monasteries grew worse and worse. 
The people were taught only what they could teach themselves. 
The consistory courts became more oppressive. Pluralities mul- 
tiplied, and non-residence and profligacy. Favored parish clergy 
held as many "as eight benefices. Bishops accumulated sees, and, 
unable to attend to all, attended to none. Wolsey himself, the 
church reformer (so little did he really know what a reformation 
meant), was at once Archbishop of York, Bishop of Winchester, 
of Bath, and of Durham, and Abbot of St. Albans. In Latimer's 
opinion, even twenty years later, and after no little reform in such 
matters, there was but one bishop in all England who was ever 
at his work and ever in his diocese. "I would ask a strange 
question," he said, in an audacious sermon at Paul's Cross, "Who 
is the most diligent bishop and prelate in all England that passeth 
all the rest in doing of his office ? I can tell, for I know him who 
it is ; I know him well. But now I think I see you listening and 
hearkening that I should name him. There is one that passeth 
all the others, and is the most diligent prelate and preacher in all 
England. And will ye know who it is? I will tell you. It is 
the devil. Among all the pack of them that have cure, the devil 
shall go for my money, for he applieth his business. Therefore ye 
unpreaching prelates, learn of the devil to be diligent in your office. 
If ye will not learn of God, for shame learn of the devil." 

Under such circumstances, we need not be surprised to find 



252 English Historians 

the clergy sunk low in the respect of the English people. Sternly 
intolerant of each other's faults, the laity were not likely to be 
indulgent to the vices of men who ought to have set an example 
of purity; and from time to time, during the first quarter of the 
century, there were explosions of temper which might have served 
as a warning if any sense or judgment had been led to profit by 
it. . . . 

§ 4. Complexity of Motives in Human Affairs 

It is never more difficult to judge equitably the actions of public 
men than when private as well as general motives have been al- 
lowed to influence them, or when their actions may admit of being 
represented as resulting from personal inclination, as well as from 
national policy. In life, as we actually experience it, motives slide 
one into the other, and the most careful analysis will fail adequately 
to sift them. In history, from the effort to make our conceptions 
distinct, we pronounce upon these intricate matters with unhesi- 
tating certainty, and we lose sight of truth in the desire to make 
it truer than itself. The difficulty is further complicated by the 
different points of view which are chosen by contemporaries and 
by posterity. Where motives are mixed, men all naturally dwell 
most on those which approach nearest to themselves; contem- 
poraries whose interests are at stake overlook what is personal in 
consideration of what is to them of broader moment; posterity, 
unable to realize political embarrassments which have ceased to 
concern them, concentrate their attention on such features of the 
story as touch their own sympathies, and attend exclusively to 
the private and personal passions of the men and women whose 
character they are considering. 

These natural, and to some extent inevitable, tendencies explain 
the difference with which the divorce between Henry VIII and 
Catherine of Aragon has been regarded by the English nation 
in the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the former, not 
only did the Parliament profess to desire it, urge it, and further it, 
but we are told by a contemporary that "all indifferent and dis- 
creet persons" judged that it was right and necessary. In the 
latter, perhaps, there is not one of ourselves who has not been 
taught to look upon it as an act of enormous wickedness. In the 
sixteenth century, Queen Catherine was an obstacle to the estab- 
lishment of the kingdom, an incentive to treasonable hopes. In 
the nineteenth, she is an outraged and injured wife, the victim 
of a false husband's fickle appetite. The story is a long and pain- 



On the Eve of the Separation from Rome 253 

ful one, and on its personal side need not concern us here further 
than as it illustrates the private character of Henry. Into the pub- 
lic bearing of it I must enter at some length, in order to explain 
the interest with which the nation threw itself into the question, 
and to remove the scandal with which, had nothing been at stake 
beyond the inclinations of a profligate monarch, weary of his queen, 
the complaisance on such a subject of the lords and commons of 
England would have colored the entire complexion of the Refor- 
mation. 

§ 5. The Divorce and State Policy 

The succession to the throne, although determined in theory 
by the ordinary law of primogeniture, was nevertheless subject 
to repeated arbitrary changes. The uncertainty of the rule was 
acknowledged and deplored by the Parliament, and there was no 
order of which the nation, with any unity of sentiment, compelled 
the observance. An opinion prevailed — not I believe traceable 
to statute, but admitted by custom, and having the force of statute 
in the prejudices of the nation — that no stranger born out of the 
realm could inherit. Although the descent in the female line 
was not formally denied, no female sovereign had ever, in fact, sat 
upon the throne. Even Henry VII refused to strengthen his title 
by advancing the claims of his wife; and the uncertainty of the 
laws of marriage, and the innumerable refinements of the Romish 
canon law, which affected the legitimacy of children, furnished, 
in connection with the further ambiguities of clerical dispensations, 
perpetual pretexts, whenever pretexts were needed, for a breach 
of allegiance. So long, indeed, as the character of the nation re- 
mained essentially military, it could as little tolerate an incapable 
king as an army in a dangerous campaign can bear with an in- 
efficient commander; and whatever might be the theory of the 
title, when the sceptre was held by the infirm hand of an Edward 
II, a Richard II, or a Henry VI, the difficulty resolved itself by 
force, and it was wrenched by a stronger arm from a grasp too 
feeble to retain it. The consent of the nation was avowed, even 
in the authoritative language of a statute, as essential to the legit- 
imacy of a sovereign's title; and Sir Thomas More, on examina- 
tion by the solicitor-general, declared as his opinion that Parlia- 
ment had power to depose kings if it so pleased. 

So many uncertainties on a point so vital had occasioned fearful 
episodes in English history; the most fearful of them, which had 
traced its character in blood in the private records of every Eng- 



254 English Historians 

lish family, having been the long struggle of the preceding century 
from which the nation was still suffering and had but recovered 
sufficiently to be conscious of what it had endured. It had deci- 
mated itself for a question which involved no principle and led to 
no result, and perhaps the history of the world may be searched 
in vain for any parallel to a quarrel at once so desperate and so 
unmeaning. . . . 

No effort of imagination can reproduce to us the state of this 
country in the fatal years which intervened between the first rising 
of the Duke of York and the battle of Bosworth, and experience 
too truly convinced Henry VII that the war had ceased only from 
general exhaustion, and not because there was no will to continue 
it. The first Tudor breathed an atmosphere of suspended in- 
surrection, and only when we remember the probable effect upon 
his mind of the constant dread of an explosion can we excuse or 
understand, in a prince not generally cruel, the execution of the 
Earl of Warwick. The danger of a bloody revolution may present 
an act of arbitrary or cowardly tyranny in the light of a public duty. 

Fifty years of settled government, however, had not been with- 
out their effects. The country had collected itself; the feuds 
of the great families had been chastened, if they had not been sub- 
dued; while the increase of wealth and material prosperity had 
brought out into obvious prominence those advantages of peace 
which a hot-spirited people, antecedent to experience, had not 
anticipated, and had not been able to appreciate. They were 
better fed, better cared for, more justly governed, than they had 
ever been before; and though abundance of unruly tempers re- 
mained, yet the wiser portion of the nation, looking back from 
their new vantage-ground, were able to recognize the past in its 
true hatefulness. Thenceforward a war of succession was the pre- 
dominating terror with English statesmen, and the safe establish- 
ment of the reigning family bore a degree of importance which 
it is possible that their fears exaggerated, yet which in fact was 
the determining principle of their action. 

Bibliographical Note 

Gairdner, A History oj the English Church in the Sixteenth Century, 
chaps, i, ii, iv, and v. Brewer, The Reign oj Henry VIII, Vol. II, chap, 
xxxv. Gasquet, Henry VIII and the English Monasteries, chap, i; Eve oj 
the Re jor motion, chap, iii on the " Two Jurisdictions," and chap, iv on 
" England and the Pope." The Cambridge Modern History, Vol. I, chaps, 
xviii and xix, for the Church and Europe on the eve of the Reformation 
Creighton, History oj the Papacy during the Period oj the Reformation. 



CHAPTER III 

PARLIAMENT AND THE BREACH WITH ROME 

After unsatisfactory negotiations with the pope for a decree 
of separation from Queen Catherine, Henry VIII in 1529 deter- 
mined to bring still greater pressure to bear in the interest of his 
case. In that year he called the famous "Reformation Parlia- 
ment," which was destined to last seven years and pass measure 
after measure until the dispute culminated in declaring Henry the 
supreme head of the English Church. The question as to whether 
this Parliament fairly represented the will of the nation constitutes 
a very important problem. If it did, there must have been a 
strong anti-papal sentiment on the eve of the ecclesiastical revolu- 
tion. The fact, however, that many if not all of the great measures 
were prepared by royal favorites and promptly passed by Par- 
liament has led some writers to regard it as no way representative 
of the nation, but a packed body constituting a servile tool of the 
king. Such is the view of Mr. Brewer in his History of Henry 
VIII to the Fall of Wolsey. On the other hand, Mr. Pollard in 
the tenth chapter of his volume on Henry VIII controverts this con- 
clusion and maintains that the Reformation Parliament was fairly 
representative of the national will. It must be admitted, however, 
that it will take a far more detailed analysis of the history of that 
Parliament than has ever been made to settle finally this very 
complicated problem. Even Mr. Pollard admits that the Parlia- 
ment would probably have been dissolved after a few weeks if 
Clement had granted the separation. But the pope would not 
or could not yield, and Parliament finally passed the last great 
acts which repudiated papal authority. A temperate and scholarly 
account of the work of this Parliament is to be found in Dixon's 
History of the Church of England. 

2 55 



256 English Historians 



§ 1. The Act Relating to Annates, Bulls, and Election of Bishops * 

The houses met January 15, 1534. Scarce a third of the spir- 
itual lords were present. Out of twenty-six abbots fourteen 
were away ; and of the bishops none other appeared but Canter- 
bury, London, Winchester, Lincoln, Bath and Wells, Llandaff, 
and Carlisle. During the session the preachers at Paul's Cross 
preached every Sunday against the authority of the pope in Eng- 
land, by order of the council. 

Of the three great acts of the session which were directed 
against Rome, the first which passed bore the title of an act "for 
the restraint of annates," or "for the non-payment of firstfruits 
to the Bishop of Rome," but it was also called, when it first ap- 
peared, a "bill concerning the consecration of bishops." . . . 
In this, as in the other enactments regarding Rome, a less defer- 
ential style marked the growing alienation of the kingdom. The 
"pope's holiness" of former statutes was constantly henceforth 
"the Bishop of Rome, otherwise called the pope." 

The body of the act may be briefly described. Whereas the 
act about annates which was made two years before, reserved 
certain payments for bulls procured from the See of Rome on the 
election of every bishop, this Act extinguished all such payments 
without reserve; it forbade bulls, breves, or any other thing to 
be procured from Rome, and confined the elections of bishops 
entirely within the kingdom. As to the form and manner of their 
election, it was least of all to be expected that the Church of Eng- 
land should have recovered now her long-lost liberty in this impor- 
tant particular; but the nominal freedom which she had enjoyed 
of old was not disturbed unnecessarily. From remote antiquity 
the theory had been that the prelates of churches and monasteries 
should be freely elected by chapters and convents, the election 
being afterwards confirmed by the consent of the king and the 
council of the realm. But this theory was rarely real, the kings in 
various ways generally contriving to overrule the elections, whether 
by nominating, investing, or signifying the candidate whom they 
preferred. The last formal settlement of the matter had been in 
the time of King John, who in one of his charters conceded that 
the election of all bishops and abbots should be free and canonical, 
the king's license to elect, or conge oVelire, being first procured. 

1 Dixon, History of the Church of England, Vol. I, pp. 180 ff. By per- 
mission of the Delegates of the Clarendon Press, Oxford. 



Parliament and the Breach with Rome 257 

But the charter of John was of no avail in protecting the liberty 
of the churches ; and the last of the royal inventions had been to 
accompany the license to elect with a letter missive to signify to 
the chapter the person whom the king desired to be elected. 

In the act which now passed, the old process of the license to 
elect, or conge d'elire, and the old abuse of royal nomination, in 
the shape of the letter missive, were both continued; but the latter 
was made part of the statute law of England for the first time. 
If the chapter failed to elect in a certain number of days, they were 
placed under a praemunire, and the king proceeded to fill the 
vacancy by simple nomination, without further regard to them. 
The bishop elect was to make his corporal oath to the king, and to 
none other. 

§ 2. The Act Concerning Papal Revenues from England 

This act was completed by another, "The act concerning 
Peter-pence and dispensations," called also "for the exoneration 
from exactions paid to the See of Rome," but which seems at 
first to have borne the franker title of "a bill for the abrogation 
of the usurped authority of the Roman pontiff." . . . 

This was the statute which the lawyers describe as discharging 
the subject from all dependence on the See of Rome. It bore 
the form of a petition or supplication to the king, to whom it set 
forth the intolerable exactions which the Bishop of Rome, other- 
wise called the pope, and his chambers, which he called apostolic, 
took out of the realm, of usurpation and sufferance. There were 
"pensions, censes, Peter-pence, procurations, fruits, suits for pro- 
visions, and expeditions of bulls for archbishoprics and bishoprics, 
and for delegacies and rescripts in causes of contentions and appeals, 
jurisdictions legatine; and also for dispensations, licenses, fac- 
ulties, grants, relaxations, writs called perinde valere, rehabili- 
tations, abolitions, and other infinite sorts of bulls, breves, and 
instruments of sundry natures, names, and kinds, in great number," 
of which the catalogue seemed swollen by the zeal of recitation. 

It was, however, no doubt true that the pope got much money 
out of England, more perhaps than from any other country; and 
that the English nation had been treated formerly by the popes 
with far less consideration than they deserved by their piety. The 
remonstrances of the English nation against the intolerable and 
incessant exactions of the pope had been heard even in the highest 
day of papal domination; all orders of men in the kingdom had 



258 English Historians 

joined in these representations ; and by the heads of the religious 
houses especially, the high pontiff had been warned that his con- 
duct would eventually cause a schism. This ancient prediction 
was fulfilled at length ; and from the venerable contribution known 
as Peter-pence down to the latest paper figment of the apostolic 
chamber, all payments to the See of Rome were swept away for- 
ever. It was declared that the realm was free from any laws of 
man, but such as had been devised within the same; and that it 
lay with the king and the Parliament, the "lords spiritual and tem- 
poral, and the commons, representing the whole state of the realm, 
in the most high court of Parliament," to abrogate, annul, alter, 
or diminish all such laws; and "not only to dispense, but also to 
authorize some elect person or persons to dispense with those 
and all other human laws of the realm, as the quality of the persons 
and matter should require." 

§ 3. Transference of Spiritual Jurisdiction 

The spiritual jurisdiction, therefore, which had been usurped 
by the See of Rome was transferred to the See of Canterbury. All 
licenses, dispensations, and other instruments which were needful 
were to be granted henceforth by the Archbishop of Canterbury, 
under restrictions which were elaborately specified in the act. 
The laborious language employed sufficiently indicates that the 
framers of the act understood and desired to maintain the dis- 
tinction between the spiritualities of a bishop and his high priestly 
office: the former only were termed "human laws," subject to 
the control of the powers of the realm; and nothing pertaining to 
a bishop was regarded therein but that spiritual jurisdiction which 
can be exercised by that ecclesiastical officer, called "the guardian 
of the spiritualities," whom the law provides during the vacancy 
of a see. 

It was this spiritual jurisdiction only which was, or could be, 
transferred from the Bishop of Rome to the Bishop of Canterbury, 
because it was this only which had been, or could have been, usurped 
by the Bishop of Rome. And therefore it could be added that the 
king, his nobles and subjects, intended not "to decline or vary 
from the congregation of Christ's Church in any things concerning 
the very articles of the Catholic faith of Christendom, or in any 
other things declared by Holy Scripture and the word of God 
necessary for their salvation; but only to make an ordinance by 
policies necessary to suppress vice and for the good conservation 



Parliament and the Breach with Rome 259 

of this realm in peace, unity, and tranquillity, from ravin and 
spoil, ensuing much the old ancient customs of this realm in that 
behalf: not minding to seek for any relief, succors, or remedies, 
for any worldly things or human laws in any cause of necessity, 
but within this realm, at the hands of his Highness, his heirs and 
successors, which had and ought to have an imperial power and 
authority in the same, and not obliged in any worldly causes to 
any other superior." 

Indulgences and all manner of privileges, and the abuses of 
them, the fatal shame of Rome, were specially ordered to be re- 
formed by the king in council. But the good that this act wrought 
was far outweighed by the evil. The true meaning and intent 
of it all was contained in the clauses by which all the exempt 
abbeys and monasteries were placed at the mercy of the king. 
The act, as we have seen, transferred a great deal of the spiritual 
jurisdiction usurped by the pope to the Archbishop of Canterbury. 
It might be supposed that it would have transferred to the Arch- 
bishop of Canterbury, among the rest, that important part of 
the pope's spiritual jurisdiction which related to the religious 
houses. 

There were religious houses, abbeys, priories, colleges, and 
hospitals which were exempt from the jurisdiction of the Eng- 
lish primate or any of his suffragans. They might not be visited 
by him, the election of their officers required no confirmation from 
him, their privileges and liberties were neither granted nor con- 
firmed by his authority. They were dependent on the pope in 
regimen ; and some of them : — the various sorts of friars — were 
associated in congregations which held their assemblies out of 
the realm. There had been struggles in all times between these 
exempt communities and the ordinaries of the Church of England ; 
and now that the authority of their foreign superior was being taken 
away, it seemed the proper thing to place them under the control 
of the English primates and bishops. 

Instead of which, there was a provision made that neither "the 
Archbishop of Canterbury, nor any other person or persons," 
should have power to "visit or vex" them. That dangerous juris- 
diction was to be intrusted to the tenderer hands of the king, and 
of such persons as the king might appoint by commission under 
the great seal. The confidence which his Parliament reposed in 
the king was indeed visibly increasing. The servile spirit which 
soon afterwards surrendered the safety of the subject by the act 
about verbal treason, and betrayed the constitution itself in the 



260 English Historians 

act of proclamations, was manifested almost as strikingly in this 
act also. With the humility of a Roman senate towards a Roman 
emperor, the Parliament of England ordained that if the king 
wished their act to take effect earlier than they had fixed, or if 
he chose to annul the whole or part of it before it took effect, he 
might issue his letters patent in those behalfs. 

§ 4. The Act for the Submission of the Clergy and Restraint of 

Appeals 

The submission of the clergy had been already extorted from 
convocation under the severe pressure of tyranny, and appeals 
to Rome had been -already abrogated in order to deprive the 
dowager-princess of her last resource. To invest the one with the 
force of statute, to confirm the other by a new enactment, and 
join the two together in a single act of Parliament, was to raise 
a legislative monument which should eternally proclaim the causes 
and the nature of the English Reformation. . . . 

This was the "act for the submission of the clergy, and restraint 
of appeals." It was ordained that the clergy, according to their 
submission, were neither to execute their old canons or constitutions 
nor make new ones, without the assent and license of the king, 
on pain of imprisonment and fine at the royal pleasure ; that their 
convocations were only to be assembled by the authority of the 
king's writ; that the king should have power to nominate two 
and thirty persons, sixteen of the spirituality and sixteen of the 
temporalty, to revise the canons, ordinances, and constitutions 
provincial; and that in the meantime such of the canons which 
were not contrariant to the laws of the realm, nor prejudicial to 
the prerogative royal, should still be used and executed as here- 
tofore. 

The flame of controversy has raged round every letter of this 
celebrated act : how far it forbade or permitted the clergy to move, 
to treat, to debate, or to legislate in their assemblies; whether it 
respected one kind of convocation or more ; and whether there were 
more than one kind of convocation which it could respect : these 
and other questions have been disputed with more than the usual 
acrimony of theological warfare, and with incredible closeness 
of research. But for the purposes of history it is enough to ob- 
serve that the intention of the act was to discourage the clergy 
from debating, not less clearly than to forbid them to make new 
ecclesiastical laws without the king. They could never be certain 






Parliament and the Breach with Rome 261 

at what point of their proceedings the king's authority and license 
might be needful ; how far they might go without it ; what kind of 
matter might require it and what not. All was left undetermined ; 
and if they attempted anything whatever, they might find them- 
selves clapped into prison and heavily fined, as having fallen into 
a praemunire. 

As for the plan of examining and revising the old canons and 
constitutions by a commission of thirty-two persons, this was never 
carried out. The king seems indeed to have nominated them; 
but he took no further notice of them or their work; and the 
ecclesiastical laws meantime remained in abeyance. It is true 
indeed that there was a provision added to the act, that those canons 
which were not contrariant to the laws of the realm and the pre- 
rogative of the king should be executed as heretofore, until the 
proposed revision should be made; but who was to determine 
which of the canons were meant? And who was to define a 
prerogative royal which was growing greater every day? The 
clergy might perhaps have shown that none of their canons were 
repugnant to the laws of the realm, if it had ever come to that; 
but they could never have been safe against the royal prerogative. 
We find the bishops, in their uncertainty after the passing of the 
act, taking out licenses for the execution of their functions as or- 
dinaries of the Church. We shall find this commission of thirty- 
two again and again promoted by act of Parliament in the course 
of the Reformation, and again and again brought to naught. 
What came of it eventually will be seen in due time. With regard 
to appeals, the act confirmed the measure of the year before in 
transferring them from Rome to Canterbury and the other arch- 
sees of England ; but it gave a further and final appeal from the 
archbishops into the court of chancery. And it so happened that 
monasteries and other places exempt were here again excepted 
from the general tenor of the law. The appeals from all such 
places which were wont to be made to Rome were ordered not 
to be made to the archbishops, but immediately into chancery. 
Thus was the axe laid to the root of the monastic tree. . . . 

§ 5. The King Made Supreme Head of the Church 

After an unusually short interval the houses of Parliament 
assembled again in the beginning of November. Their first act 
was to declare that the king ought to have the title and style of 
supreme head of the Church of England. The brief declaration 



261 English Historians 

in which this was embodied was of little more than formal impor- 
tance. It neither made, nor professed to make, any change in 
the constitution. The king was already supreme head of the 
Church of England, and the act began by saying that he was so 
already. The king had been already acknowledged by the clergy 
of the realm in their convocations to be the supreme head of the 
Church of England, and the act went on to rehearse that the clergy 
had acknowledged him already. But it seemed desirable "for 
increase of virtue in Christ's religion, and to repress and extirpe 
all errors, heresies, and other enormities and abuses," to authorize 
him to have the title and "all honors, dignities, preeminences, 
jurisdictions, privileges, authorities, immunities, profits, and 
commodities " belonging thereto. 

The honors and dignities, it may be observed, he had already, 
because he was supreme head ; the jurisdictions, privileges, au- 
thorities, and immunities which were usurped by foreign power 
had already been restored severally; and with them the profits 
and commodities which pertained to the same high office of right. 
But the houses of Parliament meant to augment very largely 
the profits and commodities, if they added nothing to the dignity 
of the head of the realm by a mere declaration of his title. The 
king, they added, was to have power and authority "to visit and 
reform errors, heresies, contempts, and offences." He had such 
power already as the supreme ordinary, and could have exercised 
it at any time through.-his spiritual officers ; and in a constitutional 
point of view the clause which thus empowered him was merely 
declaratory, like the other parts of the act. But it was a declara- 
tion made with a terrible intention. He took the advantage it 
was meant to afford, and proceeded to ruin the monasteries, and 
half ruin the Church, for his own profits and commodities. 

§ 6. Disposition of the First fruits 

It has been seen that when the clergy, two years before, acknowl- 
edged the king for their supreme head, they represented the dis- 
tress to which they were reduced by the papal exactions of annates, 
or firstfruits, and petitioned him for the abolition of these op- 
pressive impositions. Now that the lords and commons in their 
turn acknowledged the king for their supreme head, they cele- 
brated the occasion by annexing the firstfruits of all spiritual 
promotions to the crown. It might have seemed proper, since 
the pope was gone, that his exactions should go after him. But the 



Parliament and the Breach with Rome 263 

profits and commodities of the supreme head were to be aug- 
mented. . . . 

The penalty for default of payment of the tenths was depriva- 
tion. The charge of collecting them was thrown upon the bishops. 
This seemed a ready mode of discharging the inestimable obliga- 
tions which his Majesty's faithful subjects assembled owned so 
copiously. Some grains of mercy were added. No firstfruits 
were to be taken from a living of less than eight marks a year, 
unless the incumbent remained in it above three years from his 
presentation; but if he lived in it so long as that, firstfruits were 
to be levied. The fifth part of the enormous fine which the clergy 
had incurred under the praemunire two years before was remitted, 
in consideration of the yearly payments which they were hence- 
forth required to make. To prevent the act from cutting both 
ways, another act was passed. There were many lands belong- 
ing to spiritual owners which were let, it might be, to temporal 
persons. Therefore, "for certain reasonable and urgent considera- 
tions moving the king's high court of Parliament," it was ordained 
that the farmers or lessees of such lands should not be liable to 
pay firstfruits or tenths on them; but that the payment should 
fall on the spiritual owners. 

Bibliographical Note 

Pollard, Henry VIII, chap, vii on the "Origin of the Divorce," chap, 
viii on the " Pope's Dilemma," and the succeeding chapters on the work of 
the " Reformation Parliament." Gairdner, The Origin of the Divorce, in the 
English Historical Review, Vols. XI and XII. Lingard, History of England, 
Vol. V, chaps, i-iv, an old but useful work by a Catholic historian. Ranke, 
History of England Especially in the Seventeenth Century, Vol. I, pp. 91 ff. 
The Cambridge Modern History, Vol. I, chap, xiii on Henry VIII. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE MAINTENANCE OF THE NEW ESTABLISHMENT 

There is, perhaps, no page in English history more tragical than 
that on which is recorded the trial and execution of Fisher and 
More and those who could not accept the new order established 
by the Reformation Parliament. Even the heroic efforts of Mr. 
Froude to justify the new policy on grounds of state, if regarded 
as successful, cannot obscure the real character of the men who 
helped to make those great historical events. The subsequent 
destruction of the monasteries and peculiar disposal of the lands 
wrested from the religious houses give us an insight into the 
spirit and methods employed by Henry VIII and his servants. 
A brief account of this period by a distinguished scholar is to 
be found in Gairdner, History oj the English Church in the 
Sixteenth Century. 

§ i. The Execution oj the Charterhouse Monks x 

On January 15, 1535, an order was made in council that the 
title "on earth supreme head of the Church of England " should 
be added to the king's style. It was a title that shocked deeply 
religious minds — even Luther in Germany could not stomach it. 
But, as the king himself always declared, it conveyed no new powers 
and he was right. A temporal sovereign must always be supreme 
even over the Church within his kingdom. How far he may 
abuse his powers, is another question. 

Thomas Cromwell, who for some months had been the king's 
chief secretary and master of the rolls, on January 21 received a 
commission for a general visitation of the churches, monasteries, 
and clergy throughout the kingdom. On the 30th commissions 

1 Gairdner, A History oj the Church oj England in the Sixteenth Century, 
chap. ix. By permission of The Macmillan Company, Publishers. 

264 



The Maintenance of the New Establishment 26$ 

were issued for the different parts of the kingdom for a general 
valuation of benefices, that they might be taxed for firstfruits 
and tenths. The bishops were also compelled to surrender their 
bulls from Rome, and in the course of the next few months express 
renunciations of papal jurisdiction were obtained from each under 
their several seals. 

To strengthen his hands, Cromwell was appointed the king's 
vicar-general or vicegerent in spiritual things, and Cranmer and 
the bishops took their orders from him, especially about having 
the king's supremacy preached within their dioceses. The greater 
part of the clergy and bishops resigned themselves to the new state 
of affairs, which many thought so forced and artificial that it could 
not possibly last long. But the expression even of this belief 
was dangerous, and the clergy stood in dread of informers. In 
April, orders were sent out for the arrest of all who maintained 
"the Bishop of Rome's " jurisdiction or prayed for him in the pul- 
pit as pope ; and in the same month the new acts of supremacy and 
succession were first brought to bear on a little company composed 
mainly of Charterhouse monks, accused of treason. Their 
names were John Houghton, prior of the London Charterhouse, 
Augustine Webster and Robert Lawrence, heads of the two Char- 
terhouses of Axholme in Lincolnshire and Beval in Notts; Dr. 
Richard Reynolds of the Bridgettine monastery of Sion, and 
John Hale, vicar of Isleworth. Along with these was also accused 
a young priest, named Robert Feron of Teddington, who saved 
his skin and earned a pardon after condemnation by revealing 
conversations between himself and Hale. In these private utter- 
ances, Hale had spoken of the king as a cruel tyrant and robber 
of the commonwealth and commented on his gross profligacy, 
of which his second marriage was the shameful consummation. 
He was compelled to ask forgiveness for what he had said both 
of the king and Queen Anne, and could only plead in excuse that 
he had uttered the scandals against the king on information given 
him by another person. He gave the name of his informant, 
who was in fact one of his own accusers, but it does not appear that 
the latter was made to suffer for statements which, flagrant as they 
were, no doubt were strictly true. 

Prior Houghton, as we have seen, had already been in the Tower, 
and had obtained his release on terms which he was convinced 
would only be held sufficient for a time. The new acts passed in 
November, he knew well, would bring further trials, and while he 
and his convent were strengthening themselves against evil to 



266 English Historians 

come, they received as guests the two priors from the country, 
Lawrence and Webster, each of whom had come, up independently 
to visit the brethren in London. They and Prior Houghton 
took counsel together on the situation and resolved to forestall 
the coming of the king's commissioners to the monastery by a 
visit to Cromwell to urge that the brethren should not be pressed 
for any further oaths. Needless to say such persuasions were 
in vain, and the two country priors only involved themselves 
prematurely in the dangers of their London brethren. On April 
20 they appeared before Cromwell at the rolls, and were asked 
whether they would obey the king as the supreme head of the Church 
of England. They replied that they could not acknowledge him 
as such and were forthwith sent to the Tower, where they and Prior 
Houghton and Dr. Reynolds were visited six days later by Crom- 
well and other councillors to induce them to comply with the act, 
but they still refused. On the 28th they were all, including Hale 
and Feron, brought to trial at Westminster, before a special com- 
mission with the Duke of Norfolk at the head. Dr. Reynolds 
made a singularly bold and able defence. Next day, after much 
solicitation made to them to recant, they were found guilty and 
the dreadful sentence for treason was passed upon them. On 
May 4 it was carried out with even more than usual brutality, the 
men being ripped up in each other's presence, their arms torn off, 
and their hearts rubbed upon their mouths and faces. 

The world was horrified. The crime was a new one, and besides 
the barbarity of the execution there was an additional novelty 
in the fact that priests were made to expiate a civil crime without 
having been previously degraded from the priesthood. No such 
feeling was aroused when a month later (on June 4) two Dutch 
Anabaptists, a man and a woman, were burned at Smithfield, and 
twelve others were despatched to meet a like fate in other towns. 
That sect had for more than a year occasioned much trouble at 
Miinster, where they were even now besieged by their bishop. 
Their views, which, beside rebaptism and a good deal of strange 
theology, included also community of goods, had been largely 
disseminated in Westphalia and Holland, and had now overflowed 
into England. Twenty-five of these Dutch heretics, nineteen 
men and six women, were examined in St. Paul's Church on May 
25, and fourteen of them were condemned with the results just 
stated. The others were reconciled to the Church and sent 
back to the Low Countries to be dealt with as Mary of Hun- 
gary saw fit. 



The Maintenance of the New Establishment 267 



§ 2. Fisher and More 

But the fate of such victims seems almost unimportant com- 
pared with the cruelties inflicted on the most noble of the king's 
own subjects. Other prisoners in the Tower were now informed 
that they must swear to the recent statutes to avoid the fate of 
the Carthusians. These were Bishop, Fisher and Sir Thomas 
More, Dr. Nicholas Wilson, once the king's confessor, Thomas 
Abell, who had been chaplain to Queen Catherine, and Richard 
Fetherstone, the Princess Mary's schoolmaster. Six weeks were 
given them to make up their minds, but they all replied that they 
were ready to die at once rather than acknowledge the king's 
supremacy. Meanwhile the news came to England that on May 
20 Pope Paul III had made Bishop Fisher a cardinal ; at which 
Henry was more enraged than ever, and declared that he would 
send his head to Rome to receive the hat. 

Cromwell, with some others of the council, had already paid a 
visit to Fisher in the Tower on May 7 to examine him on certain 
subjects, the first of which was the king's supremacy. Cromwell 
read to him a copy of the act, but he replied that he could not agree 
to take the king as supreme head of the Church. Cromwell 
then read to him another act, making it treason to deny the su- 
premacy; but he was already aware of its contents. In fact, he 
had been informed in the beginning of February that a new statute 
had just come into operation (the date February 1 was fixed in 
the act itself) by which a number of new offences had been created 
treason, and, among other things, any attempt by word or writing 
to deprive the king or queen of any of their titles. This, of course, 
included the title of "supreme head" and it is a fact that even 
that subservient House of Commons refused to pass the bill 
without inserting the word maliciously, in the hope, apparently, 
that inoffensive persons who objected to the new title would be 
shielded from the rigor of the law. But Sir Thomas More warned 
his fellow-prisoner Fisher not to attach too much importance to 
the insertion of this word. He knew too well the way in which 
laws regarding treason were construed to believe that it afforded 
the smallest protection to the accused. 

As Rome was bent on rewarding Bishop Fisher for disowning 
royal supremacy, Henry saw that mere threats would be insuffi- 
cient to make his new title respected. On June 14 four clergy- 
men of the king's council, with a notary and some other officials, 



268 English Historians 

visited Fisher and More separately in the Tower and took 
down their answers to three interrogatories prepared beforehand. 
These were, — whether they would obey the king as head of the 
church, acknowledge the validity of his marriage with Anne and 
the invalidity of that with Catherine, and why they would not 
answer explicitly. More declined to answer any of these questions. 
Fisher stood by his refusal of the supremacy, which he offered to 
justify more fully; but as to the king's marriages, he could only 
promise to obey and swear to the act of succession without saying 
more. 

On June n an indictment was found against Bishop Fisher 
and three of the monks of the London Charterhouse, whom the 
fate of their prior had not terrified into submission. The names 
of these brethren were Humphrey Middlemore, William Exmewe, 
and our friend, Sebastian Newdigate. The clerk of the council, 
Thomas Bedyll, had visited the Charterhouse on the very day 
of the prior's execution, and after a long discussion had left some 
books of his own and others' composition against the pope's 
primacy. These the brethren returned next day without comment, 
and afterwards owned that they saw nothing in them to alter their 
opinions. Some of the other brethren, perhaps, might not be so 
steadfast, and another visitor, John Whalley, conceived that a 
little preaching might bring them over. But the three were sum- 
moned to Stepney on May 25 apparently before Cromwell and 
flatly refused to accept the king's supremacy. For this they re- 
ceived the sentence as traitors, and on the 19th they were hanged 
and quartered at Tyburn. Meanwhile on the 17th the venerable 
Bishop Fisher was brought to his trial at Westminster and received 
sentence under the same law. On the 22nd he was beheaded on 
Tower Hill and buried in the neighboring church of All Hallows 
Barking. The king apparently thought it not wise to let him be 
quartered or disembowelled, for the sympathy of the people with 
the sufferer was unmistakable. 

More's time soon followed. He was brought to his trial on 
July 1. His caution in persistently refusing to answer dangerous 
questions did not serve to protect him. He had never expressly 
denied the king's supremacy, and had always avoided the subject, 
but it was found that he had sent letters to Fisher in prison com- 
paring the act of Parliament to a two-edged sword, and Fisher 
had used the same comparison when examined by the lord chan- 
cellor in the Tower. If a man answered one way, this two-edged 
sword would confound his soul; if the other way, it would confound 



The Maintenance of the New Establishment 269 

his body. What this meant was pretty plain. Other things were 
also found out about their private communications, tending to 
involve More in Fisher's treason; and the better to insure a con- 
viction, Rich, the solicitor-general, had visited him in the Tower, 
and drawn him into a conversation about the authority of acts of 
Parliament to show that he recognized some limitation in obedience 
to them. This was no doubt the case. But the account of their 
conversation given by Rich was so entirely false, that More not 
only corrected it by giving the true story, but charged Rich with 
perjury in open court. He conducted his own defence with all 
the astuteness that might have been expected in such an able 
lawyer; but he was found guilty under the new law. Then, his 
tongue being loosed, he spoke his mind freely, declaring that he 
had studied the subject of the statute for seven years, and could 
find no good authority to maintain that a temporal man might be 
the head of a spirituality. On this he was interrupted by the chan- 
cellor, and a conversation followed in court in which the Duke of 
Norfolk also took part. But More certainly held his own, and 
ended by hoping that as St. Paul and St. Stephen whom Paul 
persecuted were now friends in heaven, it might be the same with 
him and his judges. No man ever met an unjust doom in a more 
admirable spirit. 

He was conveyed to the Tower, where on the wharf his favorite 
daughter, Margaret Roper, broke through the line of guards and 
took a last embrace of her father. The spectators were surprised 
and spellbound. When More found breath to speak, he bade her 
have patience, for she knew his mind. From his dungeon after- 
wards he wrote to her with a coal, the only writing instrument 
he was allowed : " Dear Meg. I never liked your manner towards 
me better than when you kissed me last. For I like when daugh- 
terly love and dear charity hath no leisure to look to worldly cour- 
tesy." On July 6 he was beheaded on Tower Hill. . . . 

§ 3. Visitations of the Monasteries 

The Church of England was thus left under the absolute con- 
trol of Henry, so far as its external polity was concerned. A royal 
visitation of the churches and monasteries had been contemplated 
for some time, and Cromwell had been already named in January 
as the instrument by which it should be effected. But no particular 
steps were taken to carry out the idea until the summer. The 
bishops stood in the way, many of whom were holding their own 



270 English Historians 

visitations at the time, and were not inclined to give up the last 
vestige of their independence. In June it was suggested to Crom- 
well by Dr. Richard Layton, one of the clerks of the council (who 
had examined More and Fisher in the Tower) that he and a certain 
Dr. Thomas Legh (who had examined one of Fish r's servants) 
might be appointed his commissaries for the visitation of the north 
country from the diocese of Lincoln to the borders of Scotland, 
for they had friends everywhere in those parts who would enable 
them to detect abuses. This was not conceded at once; but in 
July, having accompanied Cromwell and the court into Gloucester- 
shire, Layton was allowed to make a beginning in the visitation 
of monasteries only, taking those in that district first, while his 
friend, Dr. Legh started on a similar mission at Worcester, 
accompanied by a notary named John Ap Rice. The methods 
of these two visitors differed somewhat, and Legh actually visited 
the monastery of Bruton after Layton had visited it already ; but 
neither of them seems to have been very scrupulous, and though 
abuses no doubt existed in some monasteries, it is impossible 
to suppose they were so flagrant or so general as their reports 
imply. 

From Bath and Bristol Layton proceeded to Oxford, where he 
instituted new lectures, abolished the study of canon law, and 
committed shameful havoc in the destruction of the works of Duns 
Scotus. He then passed on into Surrey, Sussex, and Kent, where 
he caused two small monasteries at Folkestone and Dover to sur- 
render, and returned towards the end of the year to London, in 
the neighborhood of which he and Bedyll did their best to coerce 
the remaining brethren of Sion into accepting the king's new title. 
His colleague, Legh, meanwhile passed through Wiltshire, Hamp- 
shire, Berkshire, Surrey, and from thence by Bedfordshire to 
Cambridge where, in October, he visited the university (of which 
Cromwell had just been made chancellor in the room of Bishop 
Fisher), leaving a set of injunctions for its future government. 

Both visitors had professed to discover a great amount of foul- 
ness in most of the monasteries they visited, besides superstitious 
relics. But Legh was foremost in a policy of laying down severe 
regulations for the monks, binding them by antiquated restric- 
tions which it had long been impossible to maintain. And this 
policy, he frankly told Cromwell in his letters, would be useful 
in making monks sue to him for dispensations from rules which, 
even in the interest of the houses themselves, required occasionally 
to be set aside. But he and his colleague, John Ap Rice, struck out 



The Maintenance of the New Establishment 271 

a still bolder course, and suggested to Cromwell that as the bishops 
disliked interference with their visitations, they should be com- 
pelled to acknowledge that they held their jurisdiction merely from 
the king, who was therefore free to resume it into his own hands ; 
for if they were allowed to exercise it without interruption, they 
would do so according to the canon law which was now abolished. 
This advice was taken, and the bishops in the beginning of October 
received orders to suspend their visitations pending the royal 
visitation to .be held under the direction of Cromwell as vicar- 
general. 

Legh and Layton, then, having traversed by different routes 
a large part of the south of England, met before the end of the 
year at Lichfield and visited Yorkshire and the northern monas- 
teries in company. Here, as in the south, their objects were to 
inquire partly as to the revenue of the houses, and how far they 
were burdened with debt, partly as to pilgrimages, relics, and 
superstitions, but most of all as to the immoralities practised by 
the inmates. They had transmitted piecemeal reports of what 
they called their comperta in the southern houses to Cromwell. 
For the province of York and the bishopric of Coventry and Lich- 
field they made up a compendium compertorum of the most extraor- 
dinary foulness, similar to one drawn up byAp Rice from the records 
of Legh's visitation for the diocese of Norwich. If we are to be- 
lieve these "comperts" (so the word was Anglicized in a subse- 
quent act of Parliament), a large proportion of the monasteries 
of England were little better than brothels. There were even nuns 
who had had children, and in several instances by priests. Some 
of these cases may be accounted for by the fact that ladies had 
found retreats in religious houses after personal misfortune and 
disgrace, and no doubt there were other scandals here and there. 
But there are grave reasons for suspecting the whole of these 
"comperts" to be a gross exaggeration. Nor can we well believe 
that visitors cared much about the truth, who did their work so 
hurriedly. Certain it is that many of the houses which stood 
worst in their reports were afterwards declared to bear a fair 
character by gentlemen of the neighborhood specially commis- 
sioned to report on them for other purposes. Moreover, we know 
that the visitors' reports to Cromwell were secret and had a dis- 
tinct object in view, to be mentioned presently. 

Cromwell himself had conducted some visitations personally 
while travelling about with the king in the autumn of 1535. He 
had made inventories of the goods of such monasteries as came 



272 English Historians 

in his way, and had turned out all monks or nuns who had 
made their profession before they were twenty-five, letting the 
rest know that they were free either to go or remain, as a very 
rigorous reformation was at hand. Measures like these, however, 
did not tend to improve the discipline of the monasteries, which 
the royal visitation altogether was admirably calculated to destroy, 
encouraging monks to turn informers, while heads of houses were 
harassed in a way to make them weary of their charge and anxious 
to surrender. 

§ 4. The Dissolution of the Smaller Monasteries 

Legh and Lay ton concluded their work in February, 1536, 
when Henry's "Long Parliament" had met again for its last ses- 
sion. The principal measure laid before it was one for the dis- 
solution of monasteries under £200 a year in value. By what 
pressure the consent of the two houses was obtained to this meas- 
ure it might be rash to affirm, although it is certain that the king 
had intended to forbid the attendance of the abbots this session, 
and there is a remarkable tradition recorded by Spelman of a royal 
threat which intimidated the House of Commons. But the words 
of the act itself are suggestive. The preamble states that carnal 
sin and abominable living were usual in small monasteries with 
less than twelve inmates. So it is said the king had ascertained 
by the "comperts" of his late visitations, and "by sundry credible 
informations," and the only reformation possible was to suppress 
such houses entirely and transfer the inmates to large houses, 
where religion, happily, was well preserved. Writers of a later 
generation speak of a certain "Black Book" supposed to have 
been produced in this Parliament, which contained a register of 
monastic enormities; but there is no appearance that any docu- 
ment of the kind ever existed except the compendium comperto- 
rum, and certainly this, in which some of the largest monasteries 
were the worst defamed, affords no warrant for the extraordinary 
insinuation that vice prevailed invariably where the numbers fell 
below twelve, and that the great monasteries were better regu- 
lated. So it is evident that the Parliament took the king's word 
as to the character of the disclosures, and passed the bill because 
they were required to do so. Nothing else alleged to have been 
discovered in the monasteries could really have gone before Par- 
liament or the public except certain vague statements that im- 
moralities were practised in a large number of houses. 



The Maintenance of the New Establishment 273 



§ 5. The Death of Catherine 

But before this parliamentary session had begun — before the 
visitors had ended their labors in the north, and while the king's 
ambassadors in Germany were still discussing theology with Protes- 
tant divines — an event occurred which made a sensible change 
in the situation. Catherine of Aragon, after nearly four years' 
separation from her husband, died at Kimbolton on January 7, 
1536. A pathetic story which has gained too much credit with 
historians says that at the last she wrote a touching letter to Henry, 
which drew tears into his eyes when he read it. Facts, unhappily 
reported at the time in confidential despatches by Chapuys, show 
that the tale is pure invention. Catherine, for her part, could 
not have written such a letter; for she had long been obliged to 
yield to the painful conviction that her husband had become ut- 
terly hardened and unscrupulous. And the news of her death 
gave him a satisfaction that he was at no pains to conceal. " God 
be praised," he said; "we are now free from all fear of war." 
Next day he clothed himself in yellow and danced with the ladies 
of his court like one mad with delight. 

Bibliographical Note 

The great work on the dissolution of the monasteries is Gasquet, Henry 
VIII and the English Monasteries. For a full and scholarly account of 
Cromwell and bis work, consult Merriman, Thomas Cromwell. On all the 
points discussed in the above extract, compare the views and accounts given 
by Froude, History of England, and Pollard, Henry VIII. 



CHAPTER V 

THE ORIGIN OF THE DOCTRINAL REVOLT 

Dr. John Clark, in presenting to the pope Henry VIII's 
book against Luther, doubtless spoke truly when he declared that 
England "has never been behind other nations in the worship 
of God and the Christian faith, and in obedience to the Roman 
Church." In spite of attempts to demonstrate that the influence 
of Wycliffe's teachings was widespread and that there was a steady 
increase of heretical opinion in England before the Act of separa- 
tion from the Roman Church, the evidence so far adduced has not 
been very conclusive. The king and Parliament, whether repre- 
senting national will or not, were just as anxious to punish those 
who attempted to bring about changes in doctrine as those who 
retained their allegiance to the pope. It seems, therefore, that 
the distinguished Catholic writer, Dr. Gasquet, is quite sound in 
his contention that we should look to Luther rather than to Wycliffe 
as the source of the dogmatic revolution ; but it must be admitted 
that English Protestant theologians in the sixteenth century were 
influenced by the study of Wycliffe's writings. 

§ i. Religious Discontent and Lollardry 1 

It is not uncommonly asserted that the religious changes in 
England, although for convenience' sake dated from the rejection 
of papal supremacy, were in reality the outcome of long-continued 
and ever increasing dissatisfaction with the then existing ecclesi- 
astical system. The pope's refusal to grant Henry his wished-for 
divorce from Catherine, we are told, was a mere incident, which 
at most precipitated by a short while what had long been inevi- 

1 Gasquet, The Eve of the Reformation, ist edition, pp. 208 ff. By per- 
mission of Dr. Francis A. Gasquet. 

274 



The Origin of the Doctrinal Revolt 275 

table. Those who take this view are bound to believe that the 
Church in England in the early sixteenth century was honey- 
combed by disbelief in the traditional teachings, and that men 
were only too ready to welcome emancipation. What, then, is the 
evidence for this picture of the religious state of men's minds in 
England on the eve of the Reformation ? 

It is, indeed, not improbable that up and down the country 
there were, at this period, some dissatisfied spirits; some who 
would eagerly seize any opportunity to free themselves from the 
restraints which no longer appealed to their consciences, and from 
teachings they had come to consider as mere ecclesiastical for- 
malism. A Venetian traveller of intelligence and observation, 
who visited the country at the beginning of the century, whilst 
struck with the Catholic practices and with the general manifes- 
tations of English piety he witnessed, understood that there were 
"many who have various opinions concerning religion." But so 
far as there is evidence at all, it points to the fact, that, of religious 
unrest, in any real sense, there could have been very little in the 
country generally. It is, of course, impossible to suppose that any 
measurable proportion of the people could have openly rejected 
the teaching of the Church or have been even crypto-Lollards, 
without there being satisfactory evidence of the fact forthcoming 
at the present day. 

The similarity of the doctrines held by the English reformers of 
the sixteenth century with many of those taught by the followers 
of Wycliffe has, indeed, led some writers to assume a direct con- 
nection between them which certainly did not exist in fact. So 
far as England at least is concerned, there is no justification for 
assuming for the Reformation a line of descent from any form of 
English Lollardism. It is impossible to study the century which 
preceded the overthrow of the old religious system in England 
without coming to the conclusion that as a body the Lollards had 
been long extinct, and that as individuals, scattered over the length 
and breadth of the land, without any practical principle of cohe- 
sion, the few who clung to the tenets of Wycliffe were powerless 
to effect any change of opinion in the overwhelming mass of the 
population at large. Lollardry, to the Englishman of the day, 
was "heresy," and any attempt to teach it was firmly repressed by 
the ecclesiastical authority, supported by the strong arm of the 
State ; but it was also an offence against the common feeling of the 
people, and there can be no manner of doubt that its repression 
was popular. The genius of Milton enabled him to see the fact 



276 English Historians 

that "Wycliffe's preaching was soon damped and stifled by the 
pope and prelates for six or seven kings' reigns," and Mr. James 
Gairdner, whose studies in this period of our national history 
enable him to speak with authority, comes to the same conclusion. 
"Notwithstanding the darkness that surrounds all subjects con- 
nected with the history of the fifteenth century," he writes, "we 
may venture pretty safely to affirm that Lollardry was not the 
beginning of modern Protestantism. Plausible as it seems to 
regard Wycliffe as 'the morning star of the Reformation,' the 
figure conveys an impression which is altogether erroneous. 
Wycliffe's real influence did not long survive his own day, and so 
far from Lollardry having taken any deep root among the English 
people, the traces of it had wholly disappeared long before the great 
revolution of which it is thought to be the forerunner. At all 
events, in the rich historical material for the beginning of Henry 
VIII's reign, supplied by the correspondence of the time, we look 
in vain for a single indication that any such thing as a Lollard 
sect existed. The movement had died a natural death; from 
the time of Oldcastle it sank into insignificance. Though still for 
a while considerable in point of numbers, it no longer counted 
among its adherents any men of note ; and when another genera- 
tion had passed away the serious action of civil war left no place 
for the crotchets of fanaticism." 

On the only evidence available, the student of the reign of 
Henry VII and of that of Henry VIII up to the breach with Rome 
is bound to come to the same conclusion as to the state of the 
English Church. If we except manifestations of impatience with 
the pope and curia, which could be paralleled in any age and coun- 
try, and which were rather on the secular side than on the religious, 
there is nothing that would make us think that England was not 
fully loyal in mind and heart to the established ecclesiastical sys- 
tem. In fact, as Mr. Brewer says, everything proves that "the 
general body of the people had not as yet learned to question the 
established doctrines of the Church. For the most part, they 
paid their Peter-pence and heard mass, and did as their fathers had 
done before them." 

§ 2. Luther and his English Followers 

It may be taken, therefore, for granted that the seeds of religious 
discord were not the product of the country itself, nor, so far as we 
have evidence on the subject at all, does it appear that the soil of 



The Origin of the Doctrinal Revolt 277 

the country was in any way specially adapted for its fructification. 
The work, both of raising the seed and of scattering it over the soil 
of England, must be attributed, if the plain facts of history are to 
be believed, to Germans and the handful of English followers of 
the German Reformers. If we would rightly understand the re- 
ligious situation in England at the commencement of the Refor- 
mation, it is of importance to inquire into the methods of attack 
adopted in the Lutheran invasion, and to note the chief doctrinal 
points which were first assailed. 

Very shortly after the religious revolt had established itself in 
Germany, the first indications of a serious attempt to undermine 
the traditional faith of the English Church became manifest in 
England. Roger Edgworth, a preacher during the reigns of Henry 
and Queen Mary, says that his "long labors have been cast in 
most troublesome times and most encumbered with errors and 
heresies, change of minds and schisms that ever was in the realm. 
. . . Whilst I was a young student in divinity," he continues, 
"Luther's heresies rose and were scattered here in this realm, 
which, in less space than a man would think, had so sore infected 
the Christian folk, first the youth and then the elders, where the 
children could set their fathers to school, that the king's Majesty 
and all Christian clerks in the realm had much ado to extinguish 
them. This they could not so perfectly quench, but that ever since, 
when they might have any maintenance by man or woman of great 
power, they burst forth afresh, even like fire hid under chaff." 

§ 3. Protestant Literature in England 

Sir Thomas More, when chancellor in 1532, attributed the rapid 
spread of what to him and most people of his day in England was 
heresy, to the flood of literature which was poured forth over the 
country by the help of printing. "We have had," he writes, 
"some years of late, plenteous of evil books. For they have grown 
up so fast and sprung up so thick, full of pestilent errors and per- 
nicious heresies, that they have infected and killed, I fear me, 
more simple souls than the famine of the dear years, have de- 
stroyed bodies." 

We are not left in ignorance as to the books here referred to, 
as some few years previously the bishops of England had issued 
a list of the prohibited volumes. Thus, in October, 1526, Bishop 
Tunstall ordered that in London people should be warned not to 
read the works in question, but that all who possessed them should 



278 English Historians 

deliver them over to the bishop's officials in order that they might 
be destroyed as pernicious literature. The list included several 
works of Luther, three or four of Tyndale, a couple of Zwingli, 
and several isolated works, such as the Supplication of Beggars, 
and the Dyalogue between the Father and the Son. 

In 1530 the king by proclamation forbade the reading or pos- 
session of some eighty-five works of Wycliffe, Luther, (Ecolam- 
padius, Zwingli, Pomeranus, Bucer, Wesselius, and indeed the 
German divines generally, under the heading of "books of the 
Lutheran sect or faction conveyed into the city of London." 
Besides these Latin treatises, the prohibition included many 
English tracts, such as A Book of the Old God and the New, The 
Burying of the Mass, Frith's Disputation concerning Purgatory, 
and several prayer-books intended to propagate the new doc- 
trines, such as Godly Prayers, Matins and Evensong, with the 
Seven Psalms and Other Heavenly Psalms with Commendations , 
the Hortulus Animce in English, and the Primer in English. 

In his proclamation Henry VIII speaks of the determination 
of the English nation in times past to be true to the Catholic faith 
and to defend the country against "wicked sects of heretics and 
Lollards, who, by perversion of Holy Scripture, do induce erro- 
neous opinions, sow sedition amongst Christian people, and dis- 
turb the peace and tranquillity of Christian realms, as lately hap- 
pened in some parts of Germany, where, by the procurement and 
sedition of Martin Luther and other heretics, were slain an infinite 
number of Christian people." To prevent like misfortunes hap- 
pening in England, he orders prompt measures to be taken to 
put a stop to the circulation of books in English and other lan- 
guages, which teach things "intolerable to the clean ears of any 
good Christian man." 

By the king's command, the convocation of Canterbury drew 
up a list of prohibited heretical books. In the first catalogue of 
fifty-three tracts and volumes, there is no mention of any work of 
Wycliffe, and besides some volumes which had come from the pens 
of Tyndale, Frith, and Roy, who were acknowledged disciples of 
Luther, the rest are all the compositions of the German Reformers. 
The same may be said of a supplementary list of tracts, the authors 
of which were unknown. All these are condemned as containing 
false teaching, plainly contrary to the Catholic faith, and the 
bishops add, "Moreover, following closely in the footsteps of our 
fathers, we prohibit all from selling, giving, reading, distributing, 
or publishing any tract, booklet, pamphlet, or book, which trans- 



The Origin of the Doctrinal Revolt 279 

lates or interprets the Holy Scripture in the vernacular ... or 
even knowingly to keep such volumes without the license of their 
diocesan in writing." 

About the same time a committee of bishops, including Arch- 
bishop Warham and Bishop Tunstall, was appointed to draw up 
a list of some of the principal errors contained in the prohibited 
works of English heretics beyond the sea. The king had heard that 
"many books in the English tongue containing many detestable 
errors and damnable opinions, printed in parts beyond the sea," 
were being brought into England and spread abroad. He was 
unwilling that "such evil seed sown amongst his people (should) 
so take root that it might overgrow the corn of the Catholic doctrine 
before sprung up in the souls of his subjects," and he conse- 
quently ordered this examination. This has been done and the 
errors noted, "albeit many more there be in those books, which 
books totally do swarm full of heresies and detestable opinions." 
The books thus examined and noted were eight in number; 
The Wicked Mammon, the Obedience of Christian Man, the Reve- 
lation of Antichrist, the Sum of Scripture, the Book of Beggars, 
the Kalendar of the Prymer, the Prymer, and an Exposition unto 
the Seventh Chapter of I Corinthians. From these some hundreds 
of propositions were culled which contradicted the plain teach- 
ing of the Church in matters of faith and morality. In this con- 
demnation, as the king states in his directions to preachers to 
publish the same, the commission were unanimous. 

The attack on the traditional teachings of the Church, more- 
over, was not confined to unimportant points. From the first, 
high and fundamental doctrines, as it seemed to men in those days, 
were put in peril. The works set forth by the advocates of the 
change speak for themselves, and, when contrasted with those of 
Luther, leave no room for doubt that they were founded on them, 
and inspired by the spirit of the leader of the revolt, although, as 
was inevitable in such circumstances, in particulars the disciples 
proved themselves in advance of their master. Writing in 1546, 
Dr. Richard Smythe contrasts the old times, when the faith was 
respected, with the then state of mental unrest in religious matters. 
"In our days," he writes, "not a few things, nor of small impor- 
tance, but (alack the more is the pity) even the chiefest and most 
weighty matters of our religion and faith are called in question, 
babbled, talked, and jangled upon (reasoned I cannot nor ought 
not to call it) . These matters in times past (when reason had place 
and virtue with learning was duly regarded, yea, and vice with 



280 English Historians 

insolency was generally detested and abhorred) were held in such 
reverence and honor, in such esteem and dignity, yea, so received 
and embraced by all estates, that it was not in any wise sufferable 
that tag and rag, learned and unlearned, old and young, wise and 
foolish, boys and wenches, master and man, tinkers and tilers, col- 
liers and cobblers, with other such raskabilia might at their pleasure 
rail and jest (for what is it else they now do ?) against everything 
that is good and virtuous, against all things that are expedient and 
profitable, not sparing any sacrament of the Church or ordinance 
of the same, no matter how laudable, decent, or fitting it has been 
regarded in times past, or how much it be now accepted by good 
and Catholic men. In this way, both by preaching and teaching 
(if it so ought to be called), playing, writing, printing, singing, and 
(oh, good Lord !) in how many other ways besides, divers of our 
age, being their own schoolmasters, or rather scholars of the devil, 
have not forborne or feared to speak and write against the most 
excellent and most blessed sacrament of the altar, affirming that 
the said sacrament is nothing more than a bare figure, and that 
there is not in the same sacrament the very body and blood of our 
blessed Saviour and Redeemer Jesus Christ, but only a naked sign, 
a token, a memorial and a remembrance only of the same, if they 
take it for so much even and do not call it (as they are wont to do) 
an idol and very plain idolatry." 

Bibliographical Note 

Froude, History of England,Vo\. I, chap. vi. Dixon, History of the Church 
of England, Vol. III. Green, History of the English People, Vol. II, Book 
VI, chap. ii. Pocock, Condition of Morals and Religious Belief in the Reign 
of Edward VI, in the English Historical Review, 1895, pp. 417 ff. Tre- 
velyan, England in the Age of Wy cliff e, chap, ix, an argument for the sur- 
vival of Lollardry which should be compared with Gairdner, History of the 
English Church in the Sixteenth Century, chaps, iii and iv. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE LAST DAYS OF ARCHBISHOP CRANMER 

Among the leaders who worked for the introduction of revolu- 
tionary doctrinal changes into the English Church during the six- 
teenth century there is no more distinguished or striking figure 
than Thomas Cranmer. His strange and varying fortunes ending 
in his tragic death have made his character exceedingly difficult 
to understand. To many he is the great martyr to the Protestant 
faith of the English Church. On the other hand, a recent Catho- 
lic writer, J. M. Stone, in a volume on Queen Mary, renders a sum- 
mary judgment in the following fashion: "Cranmer suffered ac- 
cording to the notions of his day, on his own principles, and for 
causes which he had himself judged sufficient for death. He had 
not only sent men and women to the stake for the very same 
opinions which he afterwards professed, and had burnt Catholics 
because they would not acknowledge the king's supreme headship, 
but had burnt Protestants because their Protestantism differed 
from his own. All things considered, it was wonderful that he 
did not receive shorter shrift." Among the favorable estimates 
of Cranmer, that by Professor Pollard in his Life of Cranmer is 
both scholarly and judicial. 

§ i. Cranmer and the Appeal to a General Council 1 

While the pope was pronouncing him contumacious for taking 
no care to obey his citation and was condemning him to be deprived 
and degraded as an obstinate heretic, and while he was being burnt 
in effigy at Rome, Cranmer was engaged in drawing up an appeal 
to a general council. The law of nature, he wrote to a legal friend 

1 Pollard, Thomas Cranmer, pp. 356 ff. By permission of Professor 
Pollard and G. P. Putnam's Sons, Publishers. 

281 



282 English Historians 

whose assistance he sought, required every man to defend his 
own life so far as it might be done without offence to God ; and lest 
he should seem rashly and unadvisedly to cast himself away, he 
had resolved to follow Luther's example in appealing from Leo X. 
He was bound by oath, he said, never to consent to the reception 
of the pope's authority in England ; from this came all his trouble, 
so that the quarrel was personal between him and the pope, and 
no man could be a lawful and indifferent judge in his own cause ; 
therefore, he had good reason in appealing to a general council. 
Not that he thought his life would thereby be saved ; he was well 
aware that in 1460, Pius II by his "execrable" Bull had forbidden 
all such appeals to a general council, and thus made absolute his 
own jurisdiction. "The chiefest cause in very deed (to tell you 
the truth)," wrote Cranmer, "of this mine appeal is that I might 
gain time (if it shall so please God) to live until I have furnished 
mine answer against Marcus Antonius Constantine, which I now 
have in hand." 

The appeal was a stirring and striking document. Cranmer 
paid an eloquent tribute therein to Rome's services in early times : 
"The Church of Rome, as it were, lady of the world, both was, 
and was also counted worthily, the mother of other churches; 
forasmuch as she them first begat to Christ, nourished them with 
the food of pure doctrine, did help them with her riches, succored 
the oppressed, and was a sanctuary for the miserable, she re- 
joiced with them that rejoiced and wept with them that wept. 
Then by the examples of the bishops of Rome riches were despised, 
worldly glory and pomp were trodden under foot, pleasures and 
riot nothing regarded. Then this frail and uncertain life, being 
full of all miseries, was laughed to scorn,whiles through the example 
of Romish martyrs, men did everywhere press forward to the life 
to come. But afterward the ungraciousness of damnable ambition 
never satisfied, avarice and the horrible enormity of vices had 
corrupted and taken the See of Rome, there followed everywhere 
almost the deformities of all churches growing out of kind into 
the manners of the Church, their mother, leaving their former 
innocency and purity, and slipping into foul and heinous usages. 
For the aforesaid and many other griefs and abuses, since refor- 
mation of the above-mentioned abuses is not to be looked for of 
the Bishop of Rome ; neither can I hope by reason of his wicked 
abuses and usurped authority to have him an equal judge in his 
own cause, therefore I do challenge and appeal in these writings 
from the pope." 



The Last Days of Archbishop Cranmer 283 

He protested against being condemned in his absence; he 
could not appear in person, for he was straitly kept in prison; 
''and though I would never so fain send any proctor, yet by reason 
of poverty I am not able (for all that ever I had, wherewith I should 
bear my proctor's costs and charges, is quite taken from me)." 

§ 2. Degradation of Cranmer 

This appeal Cranmer had no means of lodging, and on Feb- 
ruary 13, 1556, Bonner and Thirlby went down to Oxford to exe- 
cute the papal commission for his degradation. The procedure 
on such occasions was a monument of exquisite cruelty; nothing 
that ingenuity could devise was omitted to abase the victim and 
wound his spirit ; and while Bonner gloated over his task, Thirlby 
must have suffered at least as much as Cranmer. He was a man 
of humanity and had received promotion, friendship, and other 
benefits from the archbishop. "Whether it were a jewel," writes 
Morice, " plate, instrument, maps, horse, or anything else, Thirlby 
had but to admire, and Cranmer would give it him." Calling the 
prisoner before them in the choir of Christ Church Cathedral, the 
two papal commissioners read their commission. When they came 
to the statement that his cause had been indifferently {i.e. impar- 
tially) heard at Rome, and that he had lacked nothing necessary 
for his defence, Cranmer was moved to anger. "God must 
needs," he exclaimed, "punish this open and shameless lying." 
Next he was clothed in the vestments of all the seven orders and 
with the insignia of an archbishop, a staff was put in his hand 
and a mitre upon his head. Then Bonner mocked him: — 

"This is the man," he said, "that hath ever despised the pope's 
Holiness, and now is to be judged by him ; this is the man that hath 
pulled down so many churches and now is come to be judged in the 
Church ; this is the man that contemned the blessed sacrament of 
the altar, and now is come to be condemned before that blessed 
sacrament hanging over the altar; this is the man that like Lucifer 
sat in the place of Christ upon an altar to judge others, and now 
is come before an altar to be judged himself." 

So pained was Thirlby at this exhibition that more than once he 
pulled Bonner's sleeve to stop him. After this they began to strip 
Cranmer of his robes. As they took off his pall he asked, "Which 
of you hath a pall to take off my pall?" He was an archbishop, 
they only bishops ; they acted, they replied, not as bishops, but as 
papal delegates. They then wrested the crozier staff from his 



284 English Historians 

hands, while he drew from his sleeve his appeal to a general 
council. Thirlby said they could admit no appeal, and the de- 
grading rite went on. Bonner scraped his fingers and nails to 
obliterate the effects of an unction administered twenty-three 
years before. Divested of episcopal rank, Cranmer was then suc- 
cessively degraded from the orders of priest, deacon, subdeacon, 
acolyte ; exorcist, lector, and doorkeeper. Finally a barber shaved 
his head to deprive him of whatever grace a long-disused tonsure 
may have originally given him. "Now," exclaimed Bonner in 
brutal triumph, "now you are no lord any more." "All this," 
said Cranmer, "needed not; I had myself done with this gear 
long ago." 

§ 3. The First Dated Recantation 

Clad in "a poor yeoman-beadle's gown, full bare and nearly 
worn," Cranmer was now as a layman handed over to the secular 
authorities, whom Bonner, if he followed the usual form, besought 
not to expose their charge to any danger of death or mutilation. 
He was taken back to Bocardo, where two days later he made the 
first of his dated recantations. It stands forth among All the 
Submissions and Recantations of Thomas Cranmer, officially pub- 
lished after his death ; and according to another recently discov- 
ered narrative, he had for six weeks or more been listening to the 
persuasions of two Spanish friars, Pedro de Soto and John de 
Villa Garcia, and of his jailor, Nicholas Wodson. He is also 
said to have asked for an interview with his old friend Tunstall, 
who replied that Cranmer was more likely to shake him than be 
convinced by him, and with Cardinal Pole, who gathered up all 
his skirts when there was fear of contact with heretics. It is as 
a result of these persuasions that Cranmer is supposed to have 
signed the first three of his recantations; but they are not really 
recantations at all. In the official version the first two are merely 
styled "submissions," and the third still more vaguely a "scrip- 
turn." They are, in fact, only submissions to authority, such as 
Cranmer's political principles almost compelled him to make. 

It must always be borne in mind that the English Reformers of 
the sixteenth century as a rule recognized no such thing as the right 
to individual judgment, and its necessary corollary, religious 
toleration. Every form of government is based on a compromise 
between two principles, either of which, when pushed to extremes, 
is fatal to human society. The idea of private judgment ulti- 
mately leads to anarchy, and the doctrine of authority to slavery. 



The Last Days of Archbishop Cranmer 285 

In some cases the law must override individual conscience, while 
on the other hand, unless individual conscience had occasionally 
defied the law, there would have been no progress ; and men who 
denounce most vigorously resistance to the law are often first to 
resist when the law touches their own individual conscience. 
Cranmer was now at the crux of the difficulty. The question for 
him, as for most others, had been between the authority of the 
pope and that of the English State represented by the king. He 
had unreservedly decided for the authority of the State, and he 
was deeply imbued with the sixteenth-century notions of the 
wickedness of resistance to the king's authority. He had in 1549 
told the rebels of Devon with unnecessary emphasis that if the 
whole world prayed for them till doomsday, it would not avail 
them unless they repented their disobedience. 

This theory involved but slight inconvenience when Henry or 
Edward was king, and when their laws concurred with Cranmer's 
conscience in renouncing the pope and his doctrine. But when 
Mary was queen the trouble began. If the English sovereign, 
Church, and Parliament had the right to abolish the papal juris- 
diction, had they not also the right to restore it ? And this author- 
ity restored, on what grounds could Cranmer resist? When ar- 
guing with Sir Thomas More about the oath of succession in 1534, 
he had suggested that More's conscience was doubtful about his 
duty to swear, but there was no doubt about his duty to obey the 
king. Even More confesses that he was unable at first to rebut the 
argument; yet he had surer ground than Cranmer in 1556 when 
the same reasoning was turned against him. For More could 
say that the voice of the Catholic Church justified him in refusing 
in this instance obedience to the king; but Cranmer could not 
plead the authority of the Church. For good or for ill, he had 
pinned his faith and allegiance to the State ; and logically he was 
driven to obey the State even when it asserted the jurisdiction of 
Rome. Was there not also scriptural warrant for yielding under 
compulsion ? Had not Elisha promised pardon to Naaman when- 
ever he bowed the knee in the House of Rimmon ? 

It was this distressing dilemma which produced Cranmer's 
first submission ; he recognized the papal authority, not because 
its claims had any intrinsic weight, but because the law of Eng- 
land, which he was bound to obey, had re-imposed that authority. 
" Forasmuch," he wrote, "as the king's and queen's Majesties, by 
consent of the Parliament, have received the pope's authority 
within this realm, I am content to submit myself to their laws 



286 English Historians 

herein." Yet he was not content ; his conscience warred with his 
logic. Whatever the laws might say, his conscience did not admit 
the papal claims. He had sworn to renounce the pope, and 
that oath represented his real convictions. Scarcely had he signed 
the first submission before he cancelled it, throwing logic to the 
winds and taking refuge in conscience. But then, what about his 
oath of allegiance to Mary and her laws? Was not that also a 
conscientious oath ? Undoubtedly it was ; his conscience was now 
divided against itself, while logic counselled submission. Thus 
divided, his conscience could not stand, and a second submission 
followed, more complete than the first. 

§ 4. Cranmefs Renewed Submissions 

The date of these two submissions cannot be ascertained. 
Perhaps they preceded his degradation, on February 14. If so, 
they were annulled by the appeal he then presented to a general 
council, in which he spoke of the heinous and usurped authority 
of the Bishop of Rome, and by his declaration during the ceremony 
that he would never again say mass. Either the indignities then 
suffered renewed his abhorrence of the papal system or the pres- 
entation of his appeal gave him fresh confidence ; for when Bonner 
visited him in Bocardo on February 15 and 16 he could only extort 
from him submissions much more guarded than before. These 
are the third and fourth recantations; the third, while expressing 
readiness to submit to the laws of the king and queen concerning 
the pope's supremacy, promised with regard to his books submis- 
sion not to the pope, but only to the judgment of the Catholic 
Church and of the next general council. The fourth recantation, 
dated February 15, was the first in which Cranmer made any direct 
reference to questions of doctrine, and he did so "in terms which 
might have been subscribed by any of the martyrs that had died." 
He simply declared his belief to be in accord with that of the 
Catholic Church ; that, of course, had all along been his conten- 
tion: popery was a corruption of Catholicism. 

These documents Bonner took back to London, where it now 
devolved upon the government, that is to say Queen Mary and 
Cardinal Pole, to decide what was to be done with the degraded 
archbishop. There is no reason to suppose that they ever in- 
tended to spare his life. They would have thought it presumption 
to neglect a papal sentence, and indeed those condemned by the 
Church were as a matter of course in Mary's reign sent to the 



The Last Days of Archbishop Cranmer 287 

stake. From their point of view, Cranmer had done evil for which 
his death would be but a slight atonement ; unable to comprehend 
the state of mind which led men to reject the doctrine of Rome, 
they and many others since their time attributed the whole Refor- 
mation in England to the divorce of Queen Catherine, in which 
Cranmer had played no small part. That to Mary was naturally 
a grievous offence, and others who shared the guilt with Cranmer 
were not sorry that he alone should bear the responsibility. Nor, 
although the contrary has often been asserted, was it illegal to 
burn a penitent heretic. 

§ 5. Preparation for the Complete Humiliation of Cranmer 

But Mary and Pole had wider objects in view than the satis- 
faction of a personal animus against Cranmer or the exemplary 
punishment of the greatest living heretical Englishman. They 
desired to serve the general cause of Roman Catholicism. It 
was not enough that Cranmer should die; he must also be made 
to ruin the Reformation. Northumberland had "turned many" 
by his speech on the scaffold; if Cranmer would only repeat the 
performance, the candle lighted by Ridley and Latimer might be 
snuffed out after all. Cranmer's weakening on the point of the 
papal supremacy had already suggested that he might be used 
for this purpose, and after Bonner's return to London means were 
considered for producing a deeper impression on Cranmer's mind. 
Terror was first employed, and on February 24 the queen signed 
a warrant for his committal to the flames. No date was fixed, 
but Cranmer was given to understand that the writ had been 
signed. 

When a sufficient interval had elapsed for this information to 
work on the prisoner's mind, his treatment was suddenly changed. 
The prison doors were thrown open, and Cranmer exchanged his 
dungeon in Bocardo for the pleasant deanery of Christ Church. 
There he was used with every consideration. He walked in the 
gardens, played bowls on the green, enjoyed the converse of men 
of learning and wit, and lacked no delicate fare. Bishop Brooks 
at his trial told him that, "Whereas you were Archbishop of Can- 
terbury and Metropolitan of England, it is ten to one (I say) that 
ye shall be as well still, yea, even better." All these things might 
be given him if — . 



288 English Historians 



§ 6. The Real Recantation 

Then Cranmer fell. He signed his fifth or real recantation, in 
which he anathematized the whole heresy of Luther and Zwingli, 
confessed his belief in one holy and visible Catholic Church, 
beyond the pale of which there was no salvation, and recognized 
the pope as Christ's vicar and supreme head of the Church on 
earth. The true body and blood of Christ were, he declared, 
really present under the forms of bread and wine in the sacrament ; 
the bread was translated into the body and the wine into the blood 
of Christ. He acknowledged the six other sacraments and the 
existence of purgatory. This was no mere submission to outward 
authority, but a professedly complete recantation of inward belief 
extorted from him by the poignant contrast between the pleasant 
prospect of life and the vivid horror of an agonizing death. He 
surrendered every point for which he had fought; the "comfort 
he had in Christ" had not, as he hoped, enabled him "to cast 
away all fear." 

Unfortunately, human frailty has made Cranmer's case a type 
rather than an exception among religious leaders. But they lived 
in times far removed from the comfortable immunity which now 
attends doctrinal vagaries; and it is more charitable and perhaps 
more fruitful to attempt to understand the psychological problem 
presented by cases like those of St. Peter, Hus, Jerome of Prague, 
Savonarola, Cranmer, and Galileo than to make broad our phy- 
lacteries and point the finger of scorn at those who succumbed to 
a test which their critics have never stood. How comes it that 
an ordinary dervish will face death without flinching when great 
religious leaders have quailed ? No doubt the horrible mode of a 
heretic's death supplied an additional terror, and courage comes 
easier on the spur of the moment, and in the heat of the battle 
than after prolonged reflection. But it is also true that the more 
sensitive the mind is, the greater is the fortitude required to con- 
front danger. It is easy for the dull brain to face death; a dog, 
could it reason, could never be made to recant, because it would 
fail to imagine death. But an impressionable imagination like 
Cranmer's paints the unknown horrors of the stake in the most 
vivid colors. It was the working of his imaginative and sus- 
ceptible mind which drove Cranmer to yield when less impression- 
able men like Hooper, Ridley, and Latimer successfully bore the 
strain. 



The Last Days of Archbishop Cranmer 289 

In another respect Cranmer was less fitted than his colleagues 
to withstand the attack. A man who sees only one side of truth at 
a time is proof against doubt; but the man of broader intellect, 
who knows that truth is relative and feels the force of hostile ar- 
guments, is inevitably less dogmatic and less absolutely sure of the 
impregnability of his position. In these days of comparative study 
it might almost be said that to be positive is to be ignorant; and 
few there are who would give their bodies to be burnt on the as- 
sumption that their opinion was the whole truth, and nothing but 
the truth. Cranmer was much nearer this modern position than 
his contemporaries; he knew, none better, that on the impreg- 
nable rock of Holy Scripture could be based arguments against 
him as well as for him, and that the voice of the Church had varied 
in various ages. Even general councils, he knew, could err; 
was he, then, unique and infallible? His distressing dilemma 
between a conscience which bade him renounce the pope and a 
conscience which bade him obey his sovereign opened a breach 
through which doubts rushed in and submerged him. 

The date of his fifth recantation is uncertain, but it was in 
print before March 13, when the privy council summoned the 
printers before them and ordered all copies to be burnt. An 
English translation of this document, writes the Venetian am- 
bassador on March 24, "was published in London, and as it was 
signed by Father Soto and his associate, both Spaniards, . . . the 
Londoners not only had suspicion of the document, but openly 
pronounced it a forgery; so the lords of the council were obliged 
to suppress it and to issue another witnessed by Englishmen." 

§ 7. The Sixth Confession and its Purpose 

It may have been partly to demolish forever these suspicions of 
forgery that Cranmer, who was now — if not before — sent back 
to Bocardo, was required to make a sixth and still more debasing 
confession; but the main object seems to have been to cover the 
whole history of the Reformation with shame and indelible infamy. 
Hitherto Cranmer had only professed a complete change of mind, 
without directly accusing his past career. Now he was to depict 
his misdeeds in the blackest hues, and to attribute to his own 
sinister influence the whole series of woes which had lately afflicted 
the realm. "I have sinned" (such were the words put into his 
mouth) "most grievously, before Heaven and against the realm of 
England, yea, against the whole Church of Christ; I have per- 



290 English Historians 

secuted more furiously than Paul; I have blasphemed, per- 
secuted, and maltreated." He was then made to compare himself 
with the thief on the cross, and to imply that, like the thief, he only 
repented when his means to do harm had failed. He was most 
deserving, proceeded the confession, not only of all human and 
temporal, but divine and eternal punishment, "because I did 
exceeding great wrong to Henry VIII, and especially to his wife, 
Queen Catherine, when I became the cause and author of their 
divorce, which crime, indeed, was the seed-plot of all the evils 
and calamities of this realm. Hence came the death of so many 
good men, hence the schism of the whole realm, hence heresies, 
hence the confounding of so many minds and bodies. ... I 
opened wide the windows to heresies of every sort, of which I 
myself was the chief doctor and ductor. ... In this, indeed, 
I was not only worse than Saul and the thief, but most accursed 
of all whom the earth has ever borne." . . . 

This last shameful confession — more shameful to those who 
dictated it than to the heart-broken captive who signed it — was 
dated March 18. It would reach London on the following day. 
Queen Mary and Pole had now got what they wanted and all they 
could hope to obtain. Here was a version of recent history even 
more pleasing to them than that of Northumberland. When 
the chief prophet of reform had cursed it in terms like these, 
who should be found to bless or defend ? A single and final ser- 
vice had Cranmer performed ; he could be of no further use except 
to repeat in public his private confession; he might now be dis- 
missed to the stake. Orders were given at once, which would 
reach Oxford on the 20th, that Cranmer should be burnt on the 
following day. Dr. Cole, Provost of Eton, was warned to prepare 
a sermon, and Lord Williams of Thame and other local magnates 
were directed to summon their forces to maintain order at the 
public execution. Cole arrived in Oxford on the 20th, and the 
lords and their retainers in the early hours next morning. 

§ 8. The Seventh Recantation 

It was probably on the day before his death that Cranmer com- 
posed what is called his seventh recantation. It consisted of the 
address he should make to the people at his execution, and when 
he wrote it out he must have already known that he was to die 
on the morrow. His sixth recantation had bent the bow to the 
uttermost; could a religious system which involved such cruelty 



The Last Days of Archbishop Cranmer 291 

be just or true ? He was still in the valley of doubts and fears, 
the light had begun to glimmer, and the harrowed mind to hope. 
Although this seventh document asserts the real and substantial 
presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and repudiates the books he 
had written against that doctrine since the death of Henry VIII, 
it contains no such painful language as its predecessors and not a 
word of submission to the pope : apart from the sacrament it 
merely professes the creed of the English Reformers. "I believe," 
he says, " every article of the Catholic faith, every clause, word, 
and sentence taught by our Saviour Jesus Christ, his Apostles, 
and Prophets, in the New and Old Testament, and all articles 
explicate and set forth in the general councils." Could it be that 
Cranmer was going over again in brief the history of his mental 
development? His previous recantations had carried him back 
to the state of belief in his youth, but they had not represented 
any deep change of conviction, and now it seemed tha't the revul- 
sion had already begun. Gradually he began to recover lost 
ground, and in this seventh recantation there is nothing incon- 
sistent with his position under Henry VIII after the breach with 
Rome. 

But the process did not stop here in a halfway house, and a 
further mental struggle ensued during the night between this 
recantation and the dawn of his dying day. Of that night of 
agony we have no record, but it needs none to depict the depth 
of Cranmer's conflicting emotions, his shame and humiliation, his 
dread of approaching torture and of the yet more dark hereafter, 
his intense desire to salve his conscience, and his aching to be at 
peace. The papist tractarian tells us that he sought comfort in the 
Penitential Psalms, but we may be sure that petitions from his own 
great Litany sprang no less readily to his lips: "that it may 
please Thee to succour, help, and comfort all that be in danger, 
necessity, and tribulation . . . and to show Thy pity upon all 
prisoners and captives ; . . . that it may please Thee to bring into 
the way of truth all such as have erred and are deceived . . . 
that it may please Thee to strengthen such as do stand, and to 
comfort and help the weak-hearted, and to raise up them that 
fall, and finally to beat down Satan under our feet." 

§ 9. The Last Day 

The morning broke in a storm of rain, and the crowds which 
thronged St. Mary's came out to see a reed shaken with the wind. 



292 English Historians 

The reed was bent and sorely bruised, but it was not broken yet; 
even now it might be fashioned into a rod. To St. Mary's Cranmer 
was led in procession between two friars, and as they approached 
the doors a significant Nunc Dimittis was raised. Inside, Cran- 
mer was placed on a stage opposite the pulpit, from which Dr. 
Cole was to preach a sermon. Cranmer had given no sign to 
Cole or the friars who visited him in the morning, but he had told 
a poor woman, on whom he bestowed some money, that he would 
sooner have the prayers of a good layman than those of a bad 
priest. That boded ill for his final profession, and both Romanists 
and Reformers passed from hope to fear and from fear to hope 
as they witnessed Cranmer's demeanor. He was made the 
touchstone of truth, and his foes themselves had determined that 
his conduct should test the strength of the two forms of faith. 

He stood there, "an image of sorrow," while Cole delivered his 
not unmerciful sermon. With more kindliness than consistency 
he recalled for Cranmer's comfort the fate of the three faithful 
children of Israel, who refused to bow before the false god which 
the king had set up, and passed through the fire unscathed. When 
he had ended he asked them all to pray for the contrite sinner. 
Cranmer knelt with the congregation. Then he rose and gave 
thanks for their prayers, and began to read from a paper he held 
in his hand. It was his seventh recantation — amended. First 
came a prayer, — "the last and sublimest of his prayers," — then 
followed four exhortations. He besought his hearers to care less 
for this world and more for God and the world to come; to obey 
the king and queen, not for fear of them only, but much more for 
the fear of God, for whosoever resisted them resisted God's ordi- 
nance; to love one another like brothers and sisters and do good 
to all men ; and finally he reminded the rich how hard it was for 
them to enter the kingdom of heaven, and moved them to charity, 
for what was given to the poor was given to God. 

" And now," he went on, " forasmuch as I have come to the 
last end of my life, whereupon hangeth all my life past and all 
my life to come, either to live with my Saviour Christ for ever in 
joy, or else to be in pains ever with the wicked devils in hell; 
and I see before mine eyes presently either heaven ready to re- 
ceive me, or else hell ready to swallow me up : I shall therefore 
declare unto you my faith without colour or dissimulation; for 
now is no time to dissemble whatsoever I have written in time 
past." 

Then Cranmer began the real work of that day. Having 



The Last Days of Archbishop Cranmer 293 

recited the Lord's Prayer in English, he began the profession of 
faith contained in the seventh recantation; but now he declared 
no unlimited belief in general councils. He had completely re- 
covered the. ground lost in his recantations and regained the posi- 
tion of 1552. If his audience perceived the drift of these changes, 
the tension must have grown almost unbearable. The climax 
was reached ; his trial was over, his triumph began. 

" And now I come to the great thing that so troubleth my 
conscience, more than any other thing that I said or did in my 
life: and that is my setting abroad of writings contrary to the 
truth, which here now I renounce and refuse as things written 
with my hand contrary to the truth which I thought in my heart, 
and written for fear of death, and to save my life, if it might be; 
and that is all such bills which I have written or signed with 
mine own hand since my degradation; wherein I have written 
many things untrue. And forasmuch as my hand offended in 
writing contrary to my heart, it shall be first burned. And as for 
the Pope, I refuse him as Christ's enemy and Antichrist, with all 
his false doctrine. And as for the Sacrament — " 

He got no farther; his foes had been dumb with amazement, 
but now their pent-up feelings broke loose. "Stop the heretic's 
mouth!" cried Cole; "take him away!" "Play the Christian 
man," said Lord Williams; "remember your recantations and 
do not dissemble." "Alas! my lord," replied Cranmer, "I have 
been a man that all my life loved plainness and never dissembled 
till now against the truth, which I am most sorry for " ; and he 
seized the occasion to add that as for the sacrament he believed 
as he had taught in his book against the Bishop of Winchester. 
The tumult redoubled. Cranmer was dragged from the stage 
and led out towards the stake. 

There was no need of a spur for his lagging steps. His desire 
was now to be gone. He had done with the quicksands of logic, 
legal formulas, and constitutional maxims, and had gained a 
foothold in conscience. The fight had been long and bitter, but 
he had reached a conclusion at length; he had "professed a good 
profession before many witnesses." The Reformation would 
not be shamed in him, and the gates of hell should not prevail 
against it. Over it, as over his own ashes, he would write the 
legend Resurgam. Eagerly he pressed forward to the scene of his 
final victory, and the friars could scarcely keep pace. Through 
Brasenose Lane and out of the gate by St. Michael's they sped to 
a spot in the present Broad Street in front of Balliol College ; there 



294 English Historians 

Ridley and Latimer had suffered six months before, and now it 
is marked by a plain stone cross in the ground. 

The friars ceased not to ply him with exhortations. "Die not 
in desperation," cried one; "Thou wilt drag innumerable souls 
to hell," said another. But Cranmer was out of their reach; it 
was not to perdition that he thought those souls would go. Cheer- 
fully he put off his upper garments and stood in his shirt, which 
reached to the ground. There was no hair on his head, but a 
long white beard flowed over his breast. He was then bound to 
the stake with a steel band, and light was set to the hundred and 
fifty fagots of furze and the hundred fagots of wood which made 
up his funeral pyre. As the flames leaped up, he stretched out 
his right hand, saying with a loud voice, "This hand hath of- 
fended," and held it steadfastly in the fire until it was burnt to 
ashes. Thus openly did he proclaim his faith by the gesture in 
which the mind of posterity paints him. No one could falsify 
that recantation ; it was a sign which none could misread. His 
body might perish; but his cause was won. He saw the travail 
of his soul, and was satisfied. 

"His patience in the torment," writes a hostile eye-witness, "his 
courage in dying, if it had been taken either for the glory of God, 
the wealth of his country, or the testimony of truth, as it was 
for a pernicious error, and subversion of true religion, I could 
worthily have commended the example, and matched it with the 
fame of any father of ancient time." 

No cry escaped his lips, no movement betrayed his pain save 
that once with his unburnt hand he wiped his forehead. The 
flames might scorch and consume his flesh, but his spirit had found 
repose; for conscience had ceased to torment, and a peace which 
passed understanding pervaded his soul. 

Bibliographical Note 

Gairdner, A History of the English Church in the Sixteenth Century, 
chaps, xvi-xix. Stone, History of Queen Mary, a recent work by a Catholic 
writer. Froude, History of England, Vol. VI, chap, xxxiii. 



CHAPTER VII 

THE ELIZABETHAN SETTLEMENT IN THE CHURCH 

It is difficult to estimate the forces which swept England into 
Protestantism after the Catholic reaction was broken by the 
death of Queen Mary. The entire Tudor period needs a treat- 
ment comparable to that which Mr. Gardiner gave the portion of 
the seventeenth century covered in his great works. The sudden 
ecclesiastical oscillations will be understood only when a detailed 
and patient analysis is made. At all events, we do know that the 
State which had adopted the Catholic faith with apparent readiness 
in 1553 turned to the established Protestant faith with the same 
readiness five years later. 

§ 1. The Opening of Elizabeth's First Parliament 1 

Ten days after her coronation, Elizabeth returned to West- 
minster to open her first Parliament. The two houses assembled 
themselves within the Abbey to hear the accustomed mass of the 
Holy Ghost, but found that the mass had been sung early that 
morning, without the elevation. The Queen arrived at the Abbey, 
after a midday dinner, in her ordinary open litter, accompanied 
by the court in their coronation robes. She had been turning 
and smiling to the people, with "gramercy, good people," all 
the way, in answer to shouts of "God save and maintain thee." 
The bishops were in her train. At the Abbey door the Abbot 
Feckenham, with all his monks in procession, each having a lighted 
torch in his hand, received her with incense and holy water; but 
when she saw the torches she exclaimed, "Away with those torches, 
for we see very well." Her choristers uplifted the Litany in 
English, and she was accompanied to the high altar under her 

1 Dixon, History of the Church of England, Vol. V, pp. 51 ff. By per- 
mission of the Delegates of the Clarendon Press, Oxford. 

295 



296 English Historians 

canopy. Not a bishop, but a returned exile ascended the pulpit; 
not an indifferently chosen returned exile, but he who had been 
dean of Westminster before Feckenham was abbot, whom 
Feckenham had displaced ; not any other pulpit ascended he than 
that from which a little time ago had sounded from the lips of 
Bishop White of Winchester the funeral oration of Mary ; and 
both White and Feckenham were compelled to abide the eloquence 
of Dr. Cox. The conqueror of Frankfort and of Knox was 
equal to himself. For an hour and a half he held the audience 
spellbound, denouncing the iniquities of monks and the persecu- 
tion in which so many innocent persons had been burnt under 
pretence of heresy; praising the queen and exhorting her no 
longer to tolerate the past iniquities, but to put down images and 
monasteries. At the end of this sermon the queen proceeded to 
the House of Lords, and the business of the session was begun 
by the new Lord Chancellor Bacon in an elaborate oration, dealing 
with three great matters, — the reformation of religion, the miti- 
gation of the penal laws, the supplies. He exhorted to uniformity, 
spoke in a masterly manner of the imperfection and abuse of laws, 
and lamented the necessities of the sovereign whose graces he was 
insufficient to extol. To the measures to be taken for such a 
settlement he seemed to predict opposition wjjen he deprecated 
contumelious words, as heretic, schismatic, papist, which he 
termed the nurses of seditious factions and sects. He seemed to 
indicate the sort of opposition to be feared when he exhorted them 
in that assembly to avoid "all sophistical, captious, and frivolous 
arguments and quiddities, meeter for ostentation of wit than 
consultation of weighty matters, comelier for scholars than coun- 
sellors, more beseeming for schools than for Parliament houses." 
The Parliament which was opened with this preamble recovered 
tenths and firstfruits to the crown, declared the royal supremacy 
in a new statute, expelled the pope once more from England, was 
illustrated by the arguments, of prelates, and was suspended to 
listen to a theological debate in Westminster Abbey. It was 
accompanied by a remarkable convocation; it was dissolved in 
May. 

§ 2. Early Acts of Parliament 

No Tudor House of Commons but was packed; this was an 
assembly of nominees of the crown. The first thing that it did 
was to restore firstfruits and tenths, and the patronage of all im- 
propriate livings to the crown, and to erect again the courts of 



The Elizabethan Settlement in the Church 297 

firstfruits and augmentations, undoing the righteous work of 
Mary in a very hypocritical strain. They preluded that they 
"conceived at the bottom of their hearts great sorrow and heavi- 
ness when they called to remembrance the huge, innumerable, 
and inestimable charges of the royal estate and imperial crown of 
this realm"; that her Majesty's dearest sister the late queen had 
restored goods to the Church "upon certain zealous and incon- 
venient respects, not sufficiently nor politically enough weighing 
the matter." All the bishops present and an abbot, Feckenham, 
were dissentient from this act : the puisne Bishop of Carlisle, and 
in ascending order the Bishops of Chester, Exeter, Coventry, 
Llandaff, Worcester, London, and York ; all lay lords were for it. 
Another act supplemented or developed it, enabling the queen, 
whose necessities were again deplored, to take in possession on 
every avoidance as much of the lands of the see as the yearly 
value of her tenths and impropriate parsonages within the see came 
to. This measure is reckoned a great starting-point in eccle- 
siastical property. It went through the Commons with diffi- 
culty late in the session. The next necessity was the recognition 
of the queen's title, a declaration that she was the heir to the 
crown, lawfully descended from the blood royal. In this neither 
was the validity of Anne Boleyn's marriage affirmed, nor the 
former act against the legitimacy of Anne Boleyn's daughter 
repealed ; dignity was consulted by neither reflecting implicitly 
in such a manner on the memory of the father nor on the birth of 
the sister of the queen ; the assembly was spared the pain of cen- 
suring the work of predecessors, and the adhesion of the bishops 
was secured. Another act made it treason to depose the queen; 
another extended to freedom of speech against her the same penal- 
ties of pillory, loss of ears, loss of hand, which had been ordained 
for the protection of Philip and Mary. 

§ 3. The Passing of the Monks 

Another, a private act of Elizabeth's first Parliament, annexed 
again to the crown the religious houses refounded so laboriously 
by Mary, the inhabitants began to disperse, and the final dissolution 
of the monasteries occupied the summer. Pensions awaited those 
who would renounce their profession and accept the oath against 
foreign jurisdiction; but some departed, some passed the seas, 
before the application of the statute. The Spanish ambassador, 
De Feria, who quitted the country in May, in his final interview 



298 English Historians 

with the queen pathetically requested as a parting gift a passport 
to carry them all with him to Flanders ; but, instead of a train of 
monks, nuns, and friars, he bore away a beautiful English bride, 
and after his departure the queen's concession was limited to those 
religious persons who had been living in the time of the great sup- 
pression of monasteries, of whom but few were left. The greater 
part of the rest remained in the kingdom. The Black Monks 
of Westminster were said to have " changed their coats," the most 
of them, by the end of May. Their abbot, Feckenham, a man of 
wealth and benevolence, passed into private life, spreading benefits 
wherever he dwelt. The Friars Observant of Greenwich were dis- 
charged in June; in July the Black Friars of Smithfield, the nuns 
of Sion, and the monks of the Charterhouse. So passed away the 
last survivors of the religious life in England. 

§ 4. The Establishment of Royal Supremacy 

The great religious enactments of this Parliament, the Acts of 
Supremacy and Uniformity, vast and permanent, the base of the 
whole ecclesiastical legislation of the reign, took their beginning 
in the House of Commons. The House prepared itself by reli- 
gious exercises. On Ash Wednesday, February 8, they adjourned 
to hear a sermon which was preached before the court by the 
favorite orator, Dr. Cox. On the following Saturday the Eng- 
lish Litany was said by the clerk of the House kneeling, and an- 
swered by the whole House on their knees with divers prayers. 
The next time that they met, Monday, February 13, they had the 
second reading of the first draft of a bill "for annexing the suprem- 
acy to the crown." A great debate ensued, and the bill was 
dashed ; a new bill was drawn, and after many arguments passed 
the House, February 25. This was the act which stands among 
statutes with the title of "An act to restore to the crown the an- 
cient jurisdiction over the estate ecclesiastical and spiritual, and 
abolishing all foreign power repugnant to the same." It repealed 
the great statute of Philip and Mary which revived the papal 
jurisdiction, by which it is said that "the subjects were eftsoons 
brought under an usurped foreign power and authority, and did 
yet remain in that bondage." It repealed the reenacted statutes 
of heresy of the same reign. It revived ten great statutes of 
Henry the Eighth specifically, and on the other hand it confirmed 
the repeal of all the other laws of Henry which had been repealed 
by Philip and Mary. The effect of this confirmation of repeal 



The Elizabethan Settlement in the Church 



299 



was to annul the title of supreme head, and at the same time to 
render necessary some new machinery to secure the royal su- 
premacy in things ecclesiastical. Supreme head died irksomely. 
Not having been assumed by the queen in the writs for this Par- 
liament, the first question that engaged the Commons when they 
met was whether through this omission the writs had been well 
issued and the Parliament were to be held. They decided it on 
the precedent of Mary's own Parliaments, which had been well 
summoned, though Mary latterly omitted the title; and they 
silently dismissed the tasteless denomination which had done so 
much to perplex history. They proceeded to abolish all usurped 
and foreign jurisdiction, to unite to the crown all jurisdiction visi- 
tatorial or corrective that had been or might lawfully be exercised 
by any spiritual power or authority, and to authorize the queen 
to exercise by commissioners, whom she might assign, the power 
thus recognized. The commissioners, who might be appointed, 
were to adjudge no matters to be heresy but upon the authority 
of the canonical Scriptures, of the first four general councils, of 
any other general council acting on the plain words of the canoni- 
cal Scriptures, or such matter as should thereafter be determined 
to be heresy by the high court of Parliament with the assent of the 
clergy in convocation. Such was the origin of the celebrated 
court of high commission. This statute was penal; it made 
maintenance of foreign authority treason for the third offence. It 
contained a form of oath in which the queen was acknowledged, 
more properly than supreme head, supreme governor of the realm 
as well in all spiritual or ecclesiastical things or causes as in tem- 
poral. This oath, which was presently to play an important part 
in history, simply denied the jurisdiction of any foreign power or 
person, without mention of the Bishop of Rome. It may be 
added that the act ended with a provision for a pending appeal to 
Rome "from a pretenced sentence given in consistory in Paul's" 
by Pole's judges delegate by legatine authority — a matrimonial 
cause, which was characteristically settled thus: If Rome gave 
answer within threescore days, Rome's answer should be allowed 
to supersede Pole's sentence and stand good; but if Rome gave 
no answer within threescore days, Richard and Agnes might 
transfer their appeal against Pole's sentence to the court of the arch- 
bishop within the realm. 



300 English Historians 

§ 5. The Act for Uniformity 

The other main statute of this Parliament, the Act for Uniformity, 
restored the English service of King Edward the Sixth with a few 
specified alterations. It was brought into the Commons, Janu- 
ary 20, by which time it may perhaps be concluded that the revision 
of the Book of Common Prayer had been finished in Sir Thomas 
Smith's house; it was expedited in about three months. This act 
was made, the most part, out of the two former Acts for Unifor- 
mity: of the first of Edward, which was clerical as to penalties 
(the reader may be reminded), and trod on the layman only who 
openly depraved the English service by interludes, ballads, or con- 
temptuous words; of the second of Edward, which extended pen- 
alty to all lay people whatever offending, whether they merely 
refused to come to their churches, or were present at any other 
form of service. Skill, prudence, and severity marked the com- 
bination. As to the clergy, the penalties laid against them re- 
mained unaltered, since it was scarcely possible to increase them; 
as to the open depravers, the fines of ten and twenty pounds for 
the first and second offences were raised enormously to one hun- 
dred and four hundred marks; it was scarcely possible to in- 
crease the penalty of the third. But the simple layman who 
would not go to church found himself also in harder case than 
before. By Edward's second Act for Uniformity he was liable to 
ecclesiastical censures; by this act he was made liable furthermore 
to a fine of a shilling a Sunday, an abominable exaction. On the 
other hand he was not pursued so far by this act as by Edward's 
act if he chose to frequent some other manner of service, for such 
an offence was not named. He was not pursued to his coventicle, 
if he had one, but the clauses of Edward's act in that behalf were 
omitted. If the significance of this had been perceived, if it 
had become known on all sides that the lavman might go where he 
would on other days, provided that he went to his church on Sun- 
days and holy days, it might have made a difference in history. 

The ordinaries and the justices were conjoined, as before, in the 
execution of these very enactments, and the solemn adjuration, 
which Edward's latter act contains, of the queen, the lords tem- 
poral, and the Commons to the archbishops, bishops, and other 
ordinaries to do their duty, was repeated. It has caused some 
searchings of heart; nor less the following clause, also borrowed 
from Edward, in which the ordinaries were empowered under 
the same authority, " by this act to reform and punish by censures 



The Elizabethan Settlement in the Church 301 

of the Church." The purport of this act was to restore the Second 
Prayer Book, the book that was " authorized by Parliament in the 
fifth and sixth year" of the reign of Edward. The various ser- 
vices and offices were ordered to be said and used in the manner 
and form of the Second Book; but my reader may remind him- 
self that if this third Act for Uniformity restored the Second Book 
of Edward, the second Act for Uniformity authorized his First 
Book. There has been but one English Service Book throughout. 
This act restored Edward's revision of the book, with several 
alterations, carefully specified, made doubtless by Smith and his 
theologians. They were, " certain lessons to be used on every 
Sunday in the year, the form of the Litany altered and corrected, 
and two sentences only added in the delivery of the sacrament to 
the communicants, and none other or otherwise." For the rest, 
some curious points may be noted in this act. It omitted all 
mention of the English ordinal, which the second Act for Uniform- 
ity had expressly and formally added to the Prayer Book as of 
the same authority, and which had not been included in the first 
act because it was not ready at the time. This legislative 
omission was artfully or naturally misunderstood, and gave 
rise in time to no small trouble. The act ended with two mem- 
orable provisions peculiar to itself. The one was a rubric, if it 
may be called so, the first form of the highly contentious rubric, 
which now stands in the Prayer Book, concerning the ornaments 
of the Church and of the minister. Instead of restoring the 
rubric of Edward's Second Book, that the minister should never 
wear alb, vestment, or cope, it ordered that all such ornaments 
as were in the second year of Edward should be retained and be 
in use until other order should be taken by the queen's authority 
with the advice of the commissioners who were to be appointed, 
or of the metropolitan of the realm. The other was a reservation 
which afterwards bore some sorry fruit, that in case of misuse or 
irreverence in the ceremonies or rites of the Church, the queen 
with the like advisers might ordain further rites and ceremonies. 
These respective clauses were the first indication of the kind of 
work to be done by these commissioners. The secondary mention 
of the metropolitan may be noted, but at least he was there. St. 
John's day, June 24, was appointed for the inuring of the act and 
of the English service. 



302 English Historians 

§ 6. Catholic Arguments against the New Law on Royal 

Supremacy 

These two great acts, one of which put out the pope and the 
other the Latin service, were boldly opposed by the Romanen- 
sian prelates. All dissented from them, and several spoke against 
them. Archbishop Heath, whose learning and piety we have so 
often admired, gave forth a laborious prelection upon the former 
of them, concerning the supremacy, which was perhaps unequal 
to his reputation. " You are by this bill," said he, "forsaking the 
See of Rome. Is there no inconvenience and danger in that? 
You are giving a supremacy, consisting of spiritual government, 
to the queen. Have you authority to grant this; or has she 
capacity to receive it ? If you meant only to withdraw obedience 
from the present Pope Paul the Fourth, who has shown himself a 
very austere stern father to us ever since his entrance into Peter's 
chair, then the cause were not of so much importance. But by 
relinquishing the See of Rome we must forsake all general coun- 
cils, all canonical and ecclesiastical laws of the Church of Christ, 
the judgment of all other princes, and the unity of Christ's Church. 
By leaping out of Peter's ship we hazard ourselves to be drowned 
in the waters of schism, sects, and divisions. As to the general' 
councils, the first four, of Nice, Constantinople, Ephesus, and 
Chalcedon, in various ways acknowledged the Bishop of Rome 
to be their chief head ; therefore to deny the See Apostolic is to set 
at naught their judgments. As to ecclesiastical laws, they wholly 
depend on the authority of the See Apostolic, and cannot bind the 
universal Church without it. As to other princes, neither Protes- 
tant nor Catholic agree with these our doings, for none of them 
ever took such a title as Henry the Eighth did. Whether are your 
wisdoms about to advise the queen to follow the example of King 
Uzziah who burned incense, or of King David who would not 
touch the ark? 

" We have as humble and godly a mistress to reign over us as ever 
had English people, if that we do not seduce and beguile her by 
our flattery and dissimulation. As to the unity of Christ's Church, 
by leaping out of Peter's ship we must, I say, be overwhelmed with 
the waters of schism, sects, and divisions. St. Cyprian says that 
the unity of Christ's Church depends upon the unity of Peter's 
authority, and that all heresies, sects, and schisms do spring for 
that men will not be obedient to the head bishop of God. Flee- 
ing from the unity of the Church of Rome, we must grant that the 



The Elizabethan Settlement in the Church 303 

Church of Rome is either of God or else a malignant Church. 
If of God, where Christ is truly taught and the sacraments rightly 
administered, how can we disburden ourselves of forsaking that 
Church with which we ought to be one and not to admit any 
separation ? If you answer that it is a malignant Church, then we 
of this realm have never received any benefit of Christ, since we 
have received no gospel, no faith, no sacraments other than were 
sent us from Rome. Holy Eleutherius sent Faganus and Dami- 
anus in the time of King Lucius. Holy Gregory sent Augustine 
and Mellitus. And now Paulus Tertius lately sent Cardinal Pole 
to restore the faith which Eleutherius and Gregory planted. If 
the Church of Rome be a malignant Church, we have been de- 
ceived ; for the doctrine must be of the nature of the Church whence 
it comes. Now, with regard to this supremacy and spiritual gov- 
ernment. Have you power to say to the queen Tibi dabo claves ? 
Have you power to bid her Pasce, pasce, pasce ? Have you power 
by act of Parliament to bid her Confirma tuos fratres ? Can you 
empower her to excommunicate and minister spiritual punishment ? 
Can you make a woman supreme head of the Church?" Thus 
Heath, arguing as if the title of supreme head had been to be 
renewed by Parliament instead of taken away, and as if the 
supremacy had been now wrongfully transferred from a foreign 
personage who never had it, and newly given to the English sov- 
ereign; whereas the act only professed "to restore to the crown 
the ancient jurisdiction over the estate ecclesiastical and spiritual." 
Bishop Scot of Chester also spoke against the bill on the third 
reading. "I reverence," said he, "the work of the noblemen 
to whom this bill has been committed ; Treasurer Winchester, the 
Duke of Norfolk, the Earls of Westmoreland, Shrewsbury, Rut- 
land, Sussex, and Pembroke, the Marquis Montague, Lords Clin- 
ton, Morley, Rich, Willoughby, and North, and the Bishops of 
Exeter and Carlisle ; for there is nothing in the bill as to altering 
the service in the Church, and the due administration of the holy 
sacraments ; they will not suffer it ; and they have mitigated the ex- 
treme penalties mentioned in the bill for gainsayers for their 
charity and pity toward the poor clergy of this realm. But unity 
is to be maintained in the Church, as order and concord in the 
civil State. Every village has one constable, every hundred one 
head constable, every shire one sheriff. All the constables are 
under the head constable, all the head constables are under the 
sheriff, and all the sheriffs are under the prince. So in the 
Church. Every village has a priest, every city has a bishop, every 



304 English Historians 

province has a metropolitan. All the priests are under the bishop, 
all the bishops are under the metropolitan, and all the metropoli- 
tans are under the pope. 

"Head governor of the Church cannot be applied to any tem- 
poral prince. Our Saviour Christ neither gave spiritual authority 
to princes nor diminished their temporal authority. It will be 
objected against me that the texts that I have quoted to this end, 
against the supremacy of princes, make nothing for the primacy 
of Peter; that the texts concerning Peter refer to the other Apostles 
equally, or refer to him alone and not to his successors. But con- 
sider this, that the succession of Peter alone continues in the 
Church, not the succession of any of the other Apostles ; that the 
same dangers of infidelity and heresy that were in Peter's days 
ceased not in the days of his successors, so that the places that refer 
to Peter refer to his successors, and it was provided that it should 
always be known where Peter's faith was to be sought and found, 
if it were anywhere lost. How otherwise shall we stay ourselves 
wavering in this our time? At this present there be thirty-four 
sects of opinions in Christendom, all differing from the Catholic 
Church, and yet all constantly challenging Christ to be their 
Foundation by Scripture, and all confessing Christ to be the Son 
of the living God, in the words of Peter's confession. I think 
then that by the Stone was meant Peter and his successors, to 
whom men may safely cleave, as it has been seen for fifteen hun- 
dred years and odd. By the evangelical voice of our Saviour, and 
by no councils or synods, was this authority of which we speak 
given to the Holy See, as is declared in the preface of the council 
Nicaea. 

"The Greek Church continued under Rome eight hundred 
years, fourteen times has it returned to Rome, and now that it is 
departed from Rome, it has fallen into extreme misery. So 
Germany, so Poland, so Denmark : look at the calamities of these 
countries, in which, however, no prince has ever taken upon him 
to be called supreme head. They are departed indeed from Rome, 
but their departure diminishes not the authority of "Rome, more 
than the loss of Normandy or France or Scotland takes away the 
imperial authority of England, but that it is an imperial crown 
still. It is alleged that it was by a provincial council or assembly 
of the clergy of the realm of England that the authority of the 
pope was abolished, and some inculcate this against us as a matter 
of great weight. But no provincial or particular council can 
make a determination against the universal Church of Christ. 



The Elizabethan Settlement in the Church 305 

And the learned men who were the doers of that, as many as are 
dead repented of their act before they died, and those that live have 
openly revoked the same. The doctrine of our adversaries is not 
yet fifty years old. If a man should ask them of whom they 
learned it, they would say of the Germans. And of whom learned 
it the Germans ? Of Luther. And of whom learned it Luther ? 
He shall answer for himself. In one of his books he says that 
such things as he taught against the mass and the blessed sacra- 
ment of the altar he learned of Satan the devil. At whose hands 
it is like that he received the rest of his doctrine. Luther ac- 
knowledges the Devil to be his schoolmaster in divers points of 
his doctrine." 

§ 7. Arguments against the Act for Uniformity 

Against the other great measure, the Act for Uniformity, which 
restored the English service, the oration of Feckenham, the only 
abbot in this, the last abbot that sat in any Parliament, repeated 
with some emphasis several arguments that had not been unheard 
before. King Lucius and his fabulous embassy, and the Roman 
emissaries, Damianus and Faganus, came out again, and the 
alleged antiquity of the papal doctrine. "Here are two kinds of 
religion propounded, — the one fourteen hundred years old, the 
other here set in a book to be received and established by authority 
of this Parliament, and to take effect next midsummer. Which 
of these is the more steadfast and agreeable with itself? Is it 
that which has a new book devised every other year, every new book 
according to the sincere word of God, and never a one of them 
agreeing in all points with the other?" He went on to point out, 
not with extreme accuracy, the differences between the First and 
Second Book of Edward. And he ended with a lamentable 
description of the disorders, the lawlessness, the running before the 
law, which marked the new religion. "Which of these religions 
breeds the more humble and obedient subjects ? In good Mary's 
days the people lived in order, and ran not before the law. There 
was no spoiling of churches, no pulling down of altars, and blas- 
phemous treading of sacraments under foot, and hanging up of the 
knave of clubs in the place thereof. There was no scotching and 
cutting of the face and legs of the crucifix and image of Christ; 
no flesh eating and shambles kept in Lent and days prohibited. 
In Mary's days the subjects, especially the nobility, knew the way 
to churches and chapels, there to begin the day with prayers; 



3° 6 



English Historians 



but since the coming of Elizabeth our dear lady and queen, all 
things are turned upside down by the preachers and scafford- 
players of this new religion. Obedience is gone, humility is 
abolished, chastity and strict living denied." But Feckenham's 
recollections were perhaps of more value than his arguments. 



Bibliographical Note 



Beesly, Queen Elizabeth, chap. ii. Froude, History of England, Vol. VIT, 
chap. i. Gneist, History of the English Constitution, chap, xxxiii. Makower, 
Constitutional History of the Church of England. Gee and Hardy, Docu- 
ments Illustrative of English Church History. Gee, The Elizabethan Clergy. 
The Cambridge Modern History, Vol. II, chap, xvi, for the Anglican 
Settlement. 



CHAPTER VIII 

EUROPE AND ENGLAND IN THE ELIZABETHAN AGE 

No one can hope to understand the domestic politics of Queen 
Elizabeth's reign without reference to the political and ecclesi- 
astical events and movements on the Continent. The Counter- 
Reformation, the untiring and ceaseless activities of the Jesuits 
in England, and the papal bull excommunicating Elizabeth threat- 
ened the foundations of the settlement reached in the English 
Church and State. Dangers from uprisings called forth by the 
possibilities of foreign intervention led to persecutions out of 
harmony with the original policy of the queen. Political plots 
helped to bring Mary Stuart to the block, and the conflict with 
Philip of Spain drew English sailors out into the high seas, thus 
contributing to the founding of England's world trade and 
empire. The most remarkable attempt to trace the relation be- 
tween English politics and continental affairs is by Professor Seeley 
in his two volumes on the Growth of English Policy. In the third 
chapter of his first volume he gives a concise and illuminating 
description of the religious situation in the second half of the six- 
teenth century. 

§ i . Elizabeth and English Insularity l 

Elizabeth stood in a singular degree disconnected from the royal 
caste. Never have we seen a sovereign so completely English. 
Not only was she English by birth on both sides, but her relatives 
were all English, and no foreign prince or princess anywhere existed 
who could count kinship with her. That a sovereign so isolated 
should reign over England for forty-five years was a fact of great 

1 Seeley, Growth of British Policy, Vol. I, Part I, chap. iii. By permission 
of the Cambridge University Press. 

3°7 



308 English Historians 

importance in English history. It concurred with that other fact, 
the new solidarity of the English and Scotch created by the Refor- 
mation, to heighten our insularity. The English State in former 
times had not been properly insular, since on the one hand the 
royal house was French and had possessions in France and foreign 
affinities, and on the other hand Scotland was foreign and had 
foreign alliances. It was not insular, since its frontier was not 
maritime but continental. But now the Continent had moved 
away from us and Scotland had drawn nearer. Elizabeth already 
rested on a party which was partly Scotch, partly English. An 
insular power began henceforth to grow up, and nothing could be 
more favorable to the growth of it than that it should be ruled for 
well-nigh half a century by a sovereign so absolutely free from 
foreign entanglements. 

§ 2. Religion as a Political Factor — Luther anism, and Cal- 
vinism Contrasted 

We are now to watch the gradual growth of a new danger, 
which in thirty years grew to such a point that we were exposed 
to a great invasion on a scale hitherto unparalleled, and found our 
policy drawn permanently into a different course. 

A new age is introduced by two new movements, by the Hugue- 
not movement in France, and by the disaffection in the Low 
Countries against the government of Philip. Both these move- 
ments are religious, and in both of them the Reformation appears 
in resolute opposition not only to the Church but also to the estab- 
lished government. 

This was the most striking novel feature of the new religious 
movement now beginning, which may be called the second or 
Calvinistic Reformation. Hitherto the Reformation had been 
opposed indeed to the hierarchy, but had been loyal to the govern- 
ment, as on the other hand government had been the agent of the 
Reformation. Luther's inclination to the side of the State had 
been from the outset very decided, and had been avowed by him 
with characteristic energy at the time of the Peasant Revolt. 
And almost universally down to the time now before us, the new 
religious system had been introduced under the authority of the 
State. In England this was perhaps most manifestly the case, 
where the author of the Reformation was the king himself, and 
where the accession of a new sovereign changed the aspect of the 
national religion three times successively. But it was also the 



Europe and England in the Elizabethan Age 309 

case substantially abroad throughout the Germanic and Scandi- 
navian world. In the North the leader of reform was Gustav 
Wasa, the first king of Sweden, so that the Reformation was a 
principal factor in the original composition of the Swedish monar- 
chy. In the German Empire and the Swiss Confederation local 
government was strongly developed and central government was 
weak. In Switzerland the Reformation was adopted, where it 
was adopted, by the councils of the great towns. In the empire 
it was adopted under the authority of princes, such as the electors 
of Saxony and Brandenburg and the Landgrave of Hesse, within 
their own territories; and at first actually with the permission 
of the Diet, though this permission was afterwards withdrawn. 
Scarcely anywhere in the Lutheran Reformation had religion been 
made a ground or justification of rebellion. 

But now in Scotland a different precedent was set, where refor- 
mation and rebellion went hand in hand, where a disaffected party 
openly attacked the mass as idolatrous and established a new 
religious system by open resistance to authority. And only in 
this way would it be possible for the Reformation to find an en- 
trance either into France or into any part of the dominion of Philip. 
For in both those regions the central government was strong and 
Catholic. There were here no principalities, bishoprics, or munici- 
palities so independent as to be practically sovereign, and linked 
together only by a federal diet whose decrees could easily be re- 
sisted. And yet at this time the Reformation as an influence was 
in some respects more irresistible than ever. Calvin, who from 
Geneva still directed the whirlwind, had given it a systematized 
doctrine, and it had by this time the prestige of many triumphs. 
Accordingly, the Reformation begins once more to be powerfully 
aggressive, and its aggressions now necessaiily take the character 
of rebellions against the State. 

This is the innovation which gives its character to the new age. 
It transferred controversy into another region. The last genera- 
tion had arraigned the Church, accusing it of a departure from 
primitive Christianity ; this generation called in question the author- 
ity of the State, inquiring whether rebellion might not in certain cir- 
cumstances be lawful. The question was at first raised in behalf 
of the Reformation, but it may be doubted whether the Reforma- 
tion profited by it and whether it ought not to be reckoned among 
the principal causes of the Counter-Reformation. For it was a 
weapon which could easily be turned against the Reformation. 
If Calvin's followers might claim, in certain circumstances, the 



2 10 English Historians 

right to rebel against a Catholic sovereign, might not a fortiori a 
Catholic people rebel against a Protestant, a heretical sovereign? 
It was an ancient pretension of the papacy, a pretension which had 
often been allowed, to dictate to kings and in case of contumacy to 
punish or depose them, and such a claim was not only less novel, 
but might seem less presumptuous, when urged in the name of the 
Catholic Church than when advanced by a modern sect. Now in 
the Lutheran period, when the Reformation and government 
went together, several monarchies had attached themselves to the 
Reformation. Such monarchies then were henceforth exposed 
to the rebellion of their Catholic subjects. 

§ 3. The Religious Situation on the Continent 

The age upon which we now enter is one of the most intense and 
terrible that Europe has ever experienced. It may be said to be 
the last of the theocratic ages, for it is an age in which ecclesias- 
tical influences take the lead as they had done in the days of 
Innocent or Hildebrand and as they have never done since the 
close of the sixteenth century, not even, as we shall find, in the 
Thirty Years' War. But the superiority is most signally on the 
Catholic side. The tendency, the irresistible drift, of the time 
is toward the Counter-Reformation, not toward the Reformation. 
It is the more necessary for us to recognize this because at this 
very time England asserted her insular character in the most 
emphatic manner by deciding irrevocably in favor of the Refor- 
mation. Let us look, then, at the broad result of the struggle. 

At the very beginning of the period all germs favorable to the 
Reformation were utterly extinguished in Spain and Italy. 

In France, the principal arena of the contest and where at the 
outset the Huguenot party showed all the eager zeal which we are 
apt to consider a sure sign of victory, the Catholic cause neverthe- 
less came out signally and decisively victorious. All that zeal 
could not save the Huguenots from being deserted by their heroic 
leader, and the toleration they ultimately secured was but the 
commencement of a long decline, but a halfway house between the 
St. Bartholomew and the dragonnades. 

In the Low Countries ten out of seventeen provinces were won 
back to Catholicism, and have remained faithful to it ever since. 

Poland and, somewhat later, Bohemia, were won back to 
Catholicism. 

In Germany, the home of the Reformation, which Charles V 



Europe and England in the Elizabethan Age 311 

had probably regarded as irretrievably given over to the Reforma- 
tion, an immense reaction took place, so that the whole southern 
part of the country was recovered to Catholicism. 

For all these losses the Reformation had on the Continent only 
one compensation, — the seven provinces of the United Nether- 
lands. These were successfully torn from the very hands of Philip. 
No very considerable acquisition territorially ! But in the seven- 
teenth century this reformed community showed an astonishing 
vigor and attained a prodigious prosperity. 

This on the Continent was the only new acquisition. But the 
Reformation retained what it had acquired in the days of Luther, 
— the Scandinavian kingdoms, three great electorates, and the 
richest of the Swiss cantons. 

§ 4. England and the Continental Situation 

It is a surprising proof of the insularity which was beginning to 
characterize us that we remained undisturbed by this irresistible 
drift, and settled down, both England and Scotland, to the Refor- 
mation in this very period. Probably nothing short of this could 
have saved the cause of the Reformation in the world. 

As we were so little influenced by the movement of the Counter- 
Reformation, the question arises how we became involved in the 
wars that accompanied it. We enjoyed for a time the security that 
resulted from the fact that Philip had his hands full in the Low 
Countries and that the French government was occupied with the 
Huguenots, while neither of those powers wished the other to ac- 
quire influence over England. How happened it that after a time 
this security was lost, and that in the end we drifted into a great 
war with Spain ? 

That first phase of Elizabethan policy which we have sketched 
is merely the necessary effort by which at the outset she secured 
her throne. Her reign itself now begins, and we may already 
make a general reflection on the character which English policy 
must necessarily have had in the Elizabethan age. The position 
of our State among states and the dangers to which it was exposed 
were wholly unlike those to which we have since been accustomed. 
Policy could not then be determined by considerations of trade 
or colonial empire, as in the eighteenth century ; nor had we yet 
begun to look wistfully towards the Low Countries or to apprehend 
the encroachments of France. We had, indeed, our keen anxieties, 
but they were of another kind, — of a kind which passed away with 



312 English Historians 

the Elizabethan age. In foreign as in domestic policy, everything 
turned on the questions of succession and of religion, and these two 
questions were intimately connected. 

Would it be possible for Elizabeth, a heretic and the daughter 
of Anne Boleyn, to support herself long upon the throne ? Was 
she not likely, like her brother and sister, to die early, and if so, 
who would succeed her? Could a heretic be permitted a second 
time to mount a throne ? Reformation was giving place to Counter- 
Reformation, and this was about to strike a great blow for universal 
dominion. The visible claimant to the succession, Mary of Scot- 
land, adhered to it. It appeared, therefore, as if the country were 
approaching a new revolution, which would arrive either with 
the death of Elizabeth or with her fall through some attack made 
upon her by the powers of the Counter-Reformation. 

The great problem of policy then was how to avert such a 
catastrophe. In general there seemed but one way of doing this, 
a way characteristic of the Habsburg age. New heirs must be 
provided, that is, marriages must be made. Elizabeth must take 
a husband, Mary Stuart must take a husband. In this way events 
might be brought about within Britain similar to those which had 
already transformed the Continent. England and Scotland might 
be united as Castile and Aragon had been; at the same time it 
would be decided whether this insular state should belong to the 
Reformation or to the Counter-Reformation. Such is the problem 
of the Elizabethan age stated in its most general form. When 
now we survey the age itself as a whole, it is seen to consist, first, 
of a long period of drifting into war with Spain ; secondly, of the 
war itself, which did not actually come to an end, though it was 
practically decided, before Elizabeth's death. On the threshold 
then we meet the question, What caused the drift toward war, since 
Elizabeth could in no case desire war w T ith the greatest power in the 
world, nor could Philip desire war with England for its own sake, 
being already overburdened ? And the answer which presents 
itself is this, That the religious crisis was just then so intense as to 
take the initiative out of the hands of governments and to hurry 
them against their will into war. In short, the solution lies in the 
word Counter -Reformation. But what precisely does this word 
convey? That it does not mean merely that inevitable reaction 
which follows a great movement of opinion, not merely a certain 
disappointment in the results of the great undertaking of Luther, 
or a certain fatigue and sense of failure, follows from what has 
just been said. As we have seen, the religious parties, Catholic 



Europe and England in the Elizabethan Age 313 

and Protestant alike, had begun to defy the civil government. 
This innovation could not but give an immense advantage to 
Catholicism, not cnly because it exposed the Reformation govern- 
ments, which were mostly somewhat imperfectly established, to the 
rebellion of the Catholic subjects, but also because it provoked 
to deadly hostility against the Reformation the Catholic govern- 
ments, among which were the greatest in the world. And thus 
we see that Philip never for a moment negotiates or offers to 
bargain with heresy, as Charles V had repeatedly done. 

But we also perceive that the Catholic party must have acquired 
in the sixties of the century some new resource of immense im- 
portance, so suddenly and overwhelmingly does the tide turn in 
their favor. About 1560 Catholicism seems to be falling into its 
final dissolution, England and Scotland having been lost, and 
France seeming likely to follow them, while Philip has but re- 
cently waged open war with the papacy. Twenty years later all 
is changed, and throughout the Continent the impression prevails 
that the struggle is well-nigh over and that the Reformation is 
defeated. And the change was lasting. Never since has the 
Reformation recovered the ground it lost so unexpectedly in those 
years. Such is the Counter-Reformation, one of the greatest events 
in the history of Europe, and as a matter of historical curiosity 
more interesting because more difficult to understand than the 
Reformation itself. 

§ 5. Reform at Rome 

For this very reason, however, we must resist the temptation 
of discussing it further than as it concerns English policy. We 
have to inquire not into its remote causes or successive phases, but 
merely into the cause which at this particular moment imparted to 
it such an overwhelmingly practical force. The Counter-Refor- 
mation first enters into history properly so called with the election 
of Caraffa to the papal chair in 1555. This was indeed a startling 
event. It removed that grievance which for something like two 
centuries had driven pious minds almost to madness, the griev- 
ance that the Vicar of Christ was not Christian at all, but either 
heathen or something worse. At the beginning of the fifteenth 
century the Vicar of Christ had been convicted of piracy and 
sodomy, and at the end of it he had been a notorious poisoner and 
murderer. Except one or two urbane humanists such as Nicholas 
V or Pius II, scarcely any pope since the fourteenth century could 



314 English Historians 

seriously pretend to the Christian character, though several had 
shown remarkable heathen qualities. With Paul IV the papacy 
became religious again, and on the whole it has retained that 
character ever since. 

But it seemed for a while that this purgation of the papacy was 
likely rather to destroy it at once than to rejuvenate it. Paul IV 
stands with Clement VII as the most unfortunate of the popes. 
The devout fanatic inflicted on Catholicism a wound almost more 
serious than that which was inflicted by the hardened worldling. 
His headstrong zeal threw away England and Scotland, alienated 
France, and broke with Philip. Under his successor, Pius IV, 
new measures were adopted expressly on account of the desperate 
extremity to which the Church was reduced. 

It was soon, however, shown that the ill fortune of Paul IV 
had not been caused by the daring courage with which he had 
asserted the religious character of the papacy and its independence 
of secular interests, but by an eccentricity quite peculiar to himself. 
Caraffa was not simply a devoted Catholic, but also an enraged 
Neapolitan politician, a leader of opposition to the Habsburg 
interest. His mortal enemy along with the Reformation was 
Philip of Spain, and he had two ends in view at the same time, — ■ 
the one to crush heresy, the other to drive the Spaniards out of 
Italy. Now if anything was certain it was this, that in that age 
Spain and Catholicism must advance or retreat together; that the 
Spanish power was the only weapon with which the Church could 
fight the Reformation, and that Philip was the true nursing-father 
to whom the Church must look, and truly though not nominally 
the Christian emperor of the time. To measure forces was not the 
talent of the fanatical Neapolitan, and he had no conception that 
his hatred for Philip undid whatever his devotion to Catholicism 
was able to achieve. He stands out in history as the man who 
severed forever the tie between Britain and the Roman Church, 
and he did this, it would appear, not simply by want of tact or 
patience in dealing with Elizabeth, but from his animosity against 
Philip, which led him to regard the whole Marian movement with 
disfavor because the Habsburg interest was promoted by it. . . . 

§ 6. Council oj Trent and Elements 0} the Catholic Reformation 

It was Pius. IV who reassembled the Council of Trent, and 
now at last brought its sittings to a satisfactory conclusion. In 
the year 1564 this was accomplished. And this is the great 



Europe and England in the Elizabethan Age 3 1 5 

occurrence which launched the Counter-Reformation upon its 
triumphant career. 

That the council, which had failed under Paul III and again 
under Julius III, did not fail a third time, was due in the first place 
to the fact that Charles V was gone. So long as there was an om- 
nipotent emperor, the discord of pope and emperor was as incur- 
able as in the days of the Hohenstauffen. But Ferdinand with 
his modest pretensions and character excited no similar jealousy. 
Moreover, the Peace of Cateau-Cambresis had not only termi- 
nated the wars which had disturbed the council in its earlier periods, 
but had actually united the Habsburg and the Valois by a mar- 
riage tie. Further, the papacy saw no hope but in a successful 
termination of the council, and was content with such a 'termi- 
nation as would give unity and a fixed programme to the Catholic 
Church as it stood, renouncing the hope of suppressing heresy 
in those countries where it was established. That the papacy now 
at last wished the council to succeed, was the greatest cause of its 
success. Still the obstacles for a time seemed insurmountable. 
For the Papal See had all along held and continued to hold the 
council firmly in its grasp through its legates, who retained the 
right of initiative, and through the superior number of Italian 
bishops. But how could the papacy in its weakened state succeed 
in overcoming the opposition of the bishops who claimed an in- 
dependent authority, especially as a third failure seemed likely to 
have fatal consequences? 

It appealed from the bishops to the sovereigns. Neither the 
Habsburgs nor the Valois, any more than the pope, desired to see 
their own bishops invested with an independent spiritual power. 
Philip, in particular, was well aware that his internal authority 
depended mainly upon the control he exercised upon the Church by 
patronage and through the Inquisition. Accordingly by informal 
concordats, as it were, negotiated by Cardinal Morone with Fer- 
dinand, Philip, and the Cardinal of Lorraine (Guise) for Charles 
IX, a settlement was reached, and what we may call modern 
Catholicism was called into existence. 

Up to this time the Counter-Reformation had consisted of the 
following elements: (1) The new form of religion represented 
by Caraffa. This was a spirit of relentless orthodoxy, which was 
indigenous in Spain, but through Caraffa and Michel Ghislieri 
had spread to Italy, and had now taken possession of the Papal 
See itself. Its main instrument was the Inquisition, and it had 
created a religious Reign of Terror in Spain and Italy such as 



3 16 English Historians 

Mary Tudor had introduced in England. (2) The influence 
of the Order of Jesuits, which just at this time began to be widely 
diffused — Loyola died in 1558 — and which, we are to observe, 
had also its origin in Spain. (3) Local movements in favor of 
Catholicism, especially in Spain and France. The unquestioning 
crusading orthodoxy of Spain was the greatest of all the forces 
which made up the Counter-Reformation ; but it was beginning to 
appear that the French mind also was radically adverse to the 
Reformation. The principal cause of this seems to lie in the in- 
fluence of the University of Paris, the original home of the scho- 
lastic theology. (4) As a consequence of this, the authority of 
the two greatest governments in the world, that of Philip and that 
of the French king, the latter being seconded by the influence of 
the Guise family to which Mary Stuart belonged. 

These influences made up a formidable aggregate when once 
the disturbance created by the eccentricity of Caraffa was removed. 
But they became formidable indeed, nay, almost overwhelming 
when they were all, as it were, bound together, and when the prin- 
ciples involved in them were codified by the Council of Trent in 
1564. 

It was easy for the Reformers to make out a case against the 
council, and to urge that when the papal authority itself was the 
question to be tried by the council, it was an absurdity that the 
conduct of the council should be put in the hands of the pope. 
But such reasonings could not prevent the decisions of the council 
when they had once been arrived at, when they had become a mat- 
ter of history, from exercising a prodigious and durable influence. 
All the world remembered that twelve hundred years before, when 
the Arian heresy had threatened the Church, a council had been 
held, and that its decisions, though long contested, had prevailed 
at last and still formed the foundation of Christian orthodoxy. It 
was natural to think that Luther would share the fate of Arius, 
and that the Spaniard Philip would now establish orthodoxy as 
the Spaniard Theodosius had done then. And together with the 
memory of the Council of Nicaea the memory of the great councils 
of the fifteenth century could not but exert its influence. The 
word reformation was not invented in Luther's time; a century 
before "Reformation in head and members" had been the watch- 
word of a great ecclesiastical party. And at that time the principle 
had been laid down that the final appeal lay to a general council. 
A general council, it was said, was superior to the pope. And this 
principle had so far prevailed that Pope John XXIII had actually 



Europe and England in the Elizabethan Age 317 

been deposed by the Council of Constance. The movement had 
indeed proved in the end abortive, but it had left behind it a fixed 
opinion that the legal method of reformation in the Church was 
by a general council. It might, indeed, be questioned whether in- 
fallibility resided in the pope; but, if even a general council could 
err, what prospect remained for the unity of the Church ? And 
so there were many to whom Luther first appeared as revolution- 
ary when he was heard to say at Leipzig that general councils 
have erred. 

§ 7. Altered Character of Catholicism after 1564 

Might it not then reasonably be held when in 1564 the Council 
of Trent separated, its work being done, that the religious question 
was now at last settled, that the Reformation in head and members 
for which two centuries had prayed was now at last complete? 
The papacy was once more religious, the taint of heathenism and 
secularity was really in a great degree purged away, and the 
council had really decreed some useful reforms. What more could 
be desired? What excuse for heresy still remained? Might it 
not be fairly conjectured that Luther himself, who had been driven 
into a revolutionary course by the monstrous wickedness of Medi- 
cean Rome and the impudence of Tetzel, would never have 
raised a protest if he had seen Rome under the pious influence of 
Carlo Borromeo ? 

In short, the Counter-Reformation was itself undeniably a great 
and real reformation, and this fact materially altered the position 
of those states which had followed Luther or Calvin. The Medi- 
cean or Farnesian papacy was so notoriously heathenized that 
the cry, "Come out of her," might fairly be raised by earnest 
Christian teachers, as indeed the appalling sack of Rome under 
Clement VII had been felt throughout Italy as a just judgment 
of the Most High. But that judgment had done its work. Gradu- 
ally but completely the papacy had become once more a religious 
institution. And under its control a general council had decreed 
a reform of the whole ecclesiastical system which was undeniably 
serious and considerable. On what ground, then, could Lutherans 
and Calvinists still justify their secession ? On the ground that 
they disapproved the decisions, dogmatic or other, arrived at by 
the council? This was at least a new ground, different from that 
which Luther had taken at the outset. Was it not a ground which 
might have been taken by any of the heretical sects of the times 
between Constantine and Heraclius ? 



3 1 8 English Historians 

What they might and did answer to arguments like these, of 
course we know. But we may admit that Catholicism had now 
assumed a position in which, if it chose to call itself exclusively the 
Christian Church, it would have all tradition on its side. The 
malcontents had appealed to a general council; a general council 
had now spoken. Reformation had been clamorously demanded ; 
reformation had been granted. Objections might perhaps be 
urged to the procedure of the council; but, on the whole, which 
party had followed precedent more faithfully, that which reformed 
the Church altogether by means of a council, or that which re- 
formed it piece by piece through the agency of a town council 
excited by the eloquence of a preacher? 

Catholicism then became after 1564 the conservatism of Christen- 
dom, and we use conservatism here in its better sense. It was 
neither the conservatism of indifference nor that of dulness 
and sloth, but a conservatism such as pious and modest minds 
might embrace and a conservatism favorable to practical reform. 
Such it was on the Continent; but we in Britain, as I have said, 
were unaffected by the movement which called it into existence. 

It rested in the first place upon this broad basis of conservative 
feeling. In the second place, it rested upon a most powerful coali- 
tion between the great sovereigns and the papacy. That Guelf- 
Ghibelline discord which had paralyzed the Church in the time of 
Charles V had disappeared. Philip, Ferdinand, and Charles IX 
were' now substantially at one, and united with the pope in favor 
of the dogmatic part of the work of the council. Pius IV had 
deliberately invoked and purchased the aid of these secular princes. 

But we are now further to note that the spiritual power had by 
no means made itself purely subservient to the temporal. It is 
the peculiar feature of this age that within the Catholic party the 
religious influence is once more supreme. The new-born reli- 
gious zeal of the papacy did not soon pass away. Caraffa was the 
first of a long line of popes who all alike were either themselves 
inspired by it or found themselves hurried along by the current. 
The model pope of this school is the.Ghislieri, Pius V, who died in 
1572. His zeal was purely religious, nor could any man hold him- 
self more superior to those worldly considerations or those intrigues 
which had made the whole policy of the Medicean papacy. 

The result is that after 1564 international politics begin to be 
controlled by a new influence. Hitherto we have seen them deter- 
mined by the family interests of the great European houses, the 
Habsburg and the Valois. But now for a time the religious influ- 



Europe and England in the Elizabethan Age 319 

ence is supreme. The regenerated Catholic Church is for a while 
the mistress of the world, as in the time of the Crusades. It is felt 
that the Council of Trent ought to be followed by the suppression of 
heresy everywhere, as of a thing no longer excusable. 

What has been called here the reconversion to Christianity of 
the Papal See is one of the most remarkable passages in the whole 
history of the Church. It has been, however, obscured from the 
view of Protestants by the fact that the Christianity of a Caraffa 
or a Ghislieri seems to them no Christianity. Assuredly it was 
not the evangelical religion that we find in the New Testament. 
It had little of u sweet reasonableness" or of "sweetness and light." 
It was in one word not the Christianity of Jesus but the Christi- 
anity of Hildebrand and Innocent. It was a religion of Crusades 
and of the Inquisition. Its principal achievements were the St. 
Bartholomew and the autos da }e of Philip II, and it may no doubt 
be argued with much plausibility that a Medicean surrounded by 
artists and humanists did more real good at the Vatican than a 
Ghislieri among his inquisitors. Indeed, the decline of Italian 
genius both in art and literature went hand in hand with this 
revival of religion. But though it may have been a dark type 
of religion, yet the new spirit which began at this time to animate 
the papacy has all the characteristics of religion, as the old spirit 
with all its amiability and urbanity was consciously and frankly 
irreligious. A Luther would not have regarded Pius V with the 
feeling of horror with which Leo X affected him. Luther, full of 
religious feeling, seemed to see in Leo Antichrist in person, and 
none the less because of the pictures and the poems. But per- 
haps there never lived a man who conveyed a more pure impres- 
sion of religiousness than Pius V. He who brought Carnesecchi 
to the stake, who charged his soldiers, when they parted for France, 
to give no quarter to Huguenots, he of whom no one doubted that 
had he lived four months longer so as to see the St. Bartholomew, 
he would have yielded up his breath with a most exultant Nunc 
dimittis, was nevertheless a saint, if devotion, single-mindedness, 
unworldly sincerity, can make a saint. 

It has often been remarked that Christianity has taken several 
great typical forms. We see in Cyprian and Augustine the grad- 
ual growth of a Latin Christianity, the characteristics of which 
Milman has so luminously discriminated. Luther may be said 
to have created Teutonic Christianity. The new development we 
have now before us resembles these in being the result of a blend- 
ing of Christianity with the spirit of a particular nation. It is 



320 English Historians 

Spanish Christianity. Its precursors in past time • had been 
Dominic in the distant thirteenth century, and more recently 
Queen Isabella, whose image may be traced among ourselves in 
her granddaughter, Mary Tudor. Caraffa himself had passed 
many years in Spain. Philip and Alva, both Spaniards, were the 
statesmen of the movement. The Spaniard Ignatius Loyola was 
its apostle. In Spain alone it seems a natural growth, and thus, 
while in Italy we find it fatal to genius, it exerts a less withering 
influence there, and in its great literary representative, Calderon, 
can boast of one of the great poets of the world. The circum- 
stances of Spanish history explain the peculiarity of it. Its mer- 
ciless rigor toward heterodoxy is not only in accordance with the 
Spanish character, but it was the natural result of a historic devel- 
opment which had been wholly determined by wars of religion. 

These general remarks prepare us to regard the year 1564 as 
introducing a new age. A final attempt was now to be made to re- 
store the unity of Christendom in accordance with the decrees 
of the Council of Trent by putting down the heretical sects which 
in nearly half a century since the first appearance of Luther had 
been allowed to acquire such influence. Thus a great trial is 
preparing for England. 

Bibliographical Note 

Cheney, International Law under Elizabeth, in the English Historical 
Review, October, 1905. Ranke, History of England, Vol. I, pp. 280 ff., on 
the European situation. Froude, Lectures on the Council of Trent. Beesly, 
Queen Elizabeth, chaps, iii, vi, vii, and x. Blok, History of the People of 
the Netherlands, Vol. III. Cambridge Modem History, Vol. II. Robinson, 
Readings in European History, Vol. II, chap, xxviii. 



CHAPTER IX 

THE GROWTH OF PURITANISM 

The religious beliefs which were to complicate the political and 
constitutional questions of the seventeenth century had gained 
strong hold in England before the death of Queen Elizabeth. 
The revolt against the old Church had given authority a severe 
blow ; the multiplication of books through printing had helped 
to break up the uniformity of ignorance and indifference which 
characterized the lower classes in the Middle Ages. Weighty 
theological questions which had been reserved to the learned in 
earlier days became matters of common controversies. The fer- 
ment of intellectual activity began to work among the people, and 
quite naturally theology was the subject-matter of that newly 
awakened interest. Thus it was that Puritanism, with its emphasis 
on moral discipline and individual conscience, sprang into existence, 
and contributed greatiy to that independence among the people 
which resisted political as well as religious authority. On this 
topic, John Richard Green wrote with great sympathy and insight. 

§ i. Position of the Bible in Elizabethan Literature 1 

No greater moral change ever passed over a nation than passed 
over England during the years which parted the middle of the 
reign of Elizabeth from the meeting of the Long Parliament. 
England became the people of a book, and that book was the 
Bible: It was as yet the one English book which was familiar to 
every Englishman ; it was read at churches and read at home, and 
everywhere its words, as they fell on ears which custom had not 
deadened, kindled a startling enthusiasm. When Bishop Bonner 

1 Green, Short History of the English People, pp. 460 ff. By permission 
of Mrs. John Richard Green. 

Y 321 



322 English Historians 

set up the first six Bibles in St. Paul's, " many well-disposed people 
used much to resort to the hearing thereof, especially when they 
could get any that had an audible voice to read to them.". . . 
"One John Porter used sometimes to be occupied in that goodly 
exercise, to the edifying of himself as well as others. This Porter 
was a fresh young man and of a big stature, and great multitudes 
would resort thither to hear him, because he could read well and 
had an audible voice." But the "goodly exercise" of readers 
such as Porter was soon superseded by the continued recitation 
of both Old Testament and New in the public services of the 
Church ; while the small Geneva Bibles carried the Scripture into 
every home. The popularity of the Bible was owing to other 
causes besides that of religion. The whole prose literature of 
England, save the forgotten tracts of Wycliffe, has grown up since 
the translation of the Scriptures by Tyndale and Coverdale. 

So far as the nation at large was concerned, no history, no 
romance, hardly any poetry, save the little-known verse of Chaucer, 
existed in the English tongue when the Bible was ordered to be 
set up in churches. Sunday after Sunday, day after day, the 
crowds that gathered round Bonner's Bibles in the nave of St. 
Paul's, or the family group that hung on the words of the Geneva 
Bible in the devotional exercises at home, were leavened with a 
new literature. Legend and annal, war-song and psalm, state- 
roll and biography, the mighty voices of prophets, the parables of 
evangelists, stories of mission journeys, of perils by the sea and 
among the heathen, philosophic arguments, apocalyptic visions, 
all were flung broadcast over minds unoccupied for the most part 
by any rival learning. The disclosure of the stores of Greek 
literature had wrought the revolution of the Renascence. The 
disclosure of the older mass of Hebrew literature wrought the 
revolution of the Reformation. But the one revolution was far 
deeper and wider in its effects than the other. No version could 
transfer to another tongue the peculiar charm of language which 
gave their value to the authors of Greece and Rome. 

Classical letters, therefore, remained in the possession of the 
learned, that is, of the few; and among these, with the exception 
of Colet and More, or of the pedants who revived a pagan worship 
in the gardens of the Florentine Academy, their direct influence 
was purely intellectual. But the tongue of the Hebrew, the idiom 
of the Hellenistic Greek, lent themselves with curious felicity to 
the purposes of translation. As a mere literary monument, the 
English version of the Bible remains the noblest example of the 



The Growth of Puritanism 



3*3 



English tongue, while its perpetual use made it from the instant 
of its appearance the standard of our language. For the moment, 
however, its literary effect was less than its social. The power of 
the book over the mass of Englishmen showed itself in a thousand 
superficial ways, and in none more conspicuously than the influ- 
ence it exerted on ordinary speech. It formed, we must repeat, 
the whole literature which was practically accessible to ordinary 
Englishmen ; and when we recall the number of common phrases 
which we owe to great authors, the bits of Shakespeare, or Milton, 
or Dickens, or Thackeray, which unconsciously interweave them- 
selves in our ordinary talk, we shall better understand the strange 
mosaic of Biblical words and phrases which colored English 
talk two hundred years ago. 

The mass of picturesque allusion and illustration which we 
borrow from a thousand books, our fathers were forced to borrow 
from one ; and the borrowing was the easier and the more natural 
that the range of the Hebrew literature fitted it for the expression 
of every phase of feeling. When Spenser poured forth his warmest 
love-notes in the Epithalamion he adopted the very words of 
the Psalmist as he bade the gates open for the entrance of his 
bride. When Cromwell saw the mists break over the hills of 
Dunbar, he hailed the sun-burst with the cry of David : "Let God 
arise, and let his enemies be scattered. Like as the smoke van- 
isheth, so shalt thou drive them away ! " Even to common minds 
this familiarity with grand poetic imagery in prophet and apoca- 
lypse gave a loftiness and ardor of expression that with all its 
tendency to exaggeration and bombast we may prefer to the slip- 
shod vulgarisms of to-day. 

But far greater than its effect on literature or social phrase was 
the effect of the Bible on the character of the people at large. 
Elizabeth might silence or tune the pulpits ; but it was impossible 
for her to silence or tune the great preachers of justice and mercy 
and truth who spoke from the book which she had again opened 
for her people. The whole moral effect which is produced nowa- 
days by the religious newspaper, the tract, the essay, the lecture, 
the missionary report, the sermon, was then produced by the Bible 
alone; and its effect in this way, however dispassionately we ex- 
amine it, was simply amazing. One dominant influence told on 
human action ; and all the activities that had been called into life 
by the age that was passing away were seized, concentrated, and 
steadied to a definite aim by the spirit of religion. The whole 
temper of the nation felt the change. A new conception of life 



j 24 English Historians 

and of man superseded the old. A new moral and religious im- 
pulse spread through every class. 

Literature reflected the general tendency of the time; and the 
dumpy little quartos of controversy and piety, which still crowd 
our older libraries, drove before them the classical translations 
and Italian novelettes of the age of the Renascence. "Theology 
rules there," said Grotius of England only two years after Eliza- 
beth's death; and when Casaubon, the last of the great scholars 
of the sixteenth century, was invited to England by King James, 
he found both king and people indifferent to pure letters. "There 
is great abundance of theologians in England," he said; "all point 
their studies in that direction." Even a country gentleman like 
Colonel Hutchinson felt the theological impulse. "As soon as he 
had improved his natural understanding with the acquisition of 
learning, the first studies he exercised himself in were the prin- 
ciples of religion." The whole nation became, in fact, a Church. 
The great problems of life and death, whose questionings found 
no answer in the higher minds of Shakespeare's day, pressed for an 
answer not only from noble and scholar, but from farmer and shop- 
keeper in the age that followed him. . . . 

§ 2. The English Church 

Elizabeth's church policy rested on the Acts of Supremacy and 
of Uniformity, the first of which placed all ecclesiastical juris- 
diction and legislative power in the hands of the State, while the 
second prescribed a course of doctrine and discipline from which 
no variation was legally permissible. For the nation at large 
Elizabeth's system was no doubt a wise and healthy one. Single- 
handed, unsupported by any of the statesmen or divines about her, 
the queen forced on the warring religions a sort of armed truce. 
The main principles of the Reformation were accepted, but the 
zeal of the ultra-Reformers was held at bay. The Bible was left 
open, private discussion was unrestrained; but the warfare of 
pulpit against pulpit was silenced by the licensing of preachers. 
Outer conformity, attendance at the common prayer, was exacted 
from all ; but the changes in ritual by which the zealots of Geneva 
gave prominence to the radical features of the religious change 
which was passing over the country were steadily resisted. While 
England was struggling for existence, this balanced attitude of the 
crown reflected faithfully enough the balanced attitude of the 
nation ; but with the declaration of war by the papacy in the Bull 



The Growth of Puritanism 325 

of Deposition the movement in favor of a more pronounced 
Protestantism gathered a new strength. 

Unhappily the queen clung obstinately to her system of com- 
promise, weakened and broken as it was. With the religious en- 
thusiasm which was growing up around her she had no sympathy 
whatever. Her passion was for moderation, her aim was simply 
civil order; and both order and moderation were threatened 
by the knot of clerical bigots who gathered under the banner of 
Presbyterianism. Of these Thomas Cartwright was the chief. 
He had studied at Geneva; he returned with a fanatical faith in 
Calvinism and in the system of church government which Calvin 
had devised ; and as Margaret Professor of Divinity at Cambridge 
he used to the full the opportunities which his chair gave him of 
propagating his opinions. No leader of a religious party ever 
deserved less of after-sympathy than Cartwright. He was un- 
questionably learned and devout, but his bigotry was that of a 
mediaeval inquisitor. The relics of the old ritual, the cross in 
baptism, the surplice, the giving of a ring in marriage, were to him 
not merely distasteful, as they were to the Puritans at large, they 
were idolatrous and the mark of the beast. His declamation 
against ceremonies and superstition, however, had little weight with 
Elizabeth or her primates; what scared them was his reckless 
advocacy of a scheme of ecclesiastical government which placed 
the State beneath the feet of the Church. The absolute rule of 
bishops, indeed, he denounced as begotten of the Devil; but the 
absolute rule of Presbyters he held to be established by the word 
of God. 

For the Church modelled after the fashion of Geneva he claimed 
an authority which surpassed the wildest dreams of the masters of 
the Vatican. All spiritual authority and jurisdiction, the decree- 
ing of doctrine, the ordering of ceremonies, lay wholly in the 
hands of the ministers of the Church. To them belonged the 
supervision of public morals. In an ordered arrangement of 
classes and synods these Presbyters were to govern their flocks, 
to regulate their own order, to decide in matters of faith, to admin- 
ister "discipline." 

Their weapon was excommunication, and they were responsible 
for its use to none but Christ. The province of the civil ruler was 
simply to carry out the decisions of the Presbyters, "to see their 
decrees executed and to punish the contemners of them." The 
spirit of Calvinistic Presbyterianism excluded all toleration of 
practice or belief. Not only was the rule of ministers to be 



326 English Historians 

established as the one legal form of church government, but all 
other forms, Episcopalian and Separatist, were to be ruthlessly 
put down. For heresy there was the punishment of death. Never 
had the doctrine of persecution been urged with such a blind and 
reckless ferocity. "I deny," wrote Cartwright, "that upon re- 
pentance there ought to follow any pardon of death. . . . Here- 
tics ought to be put to death now. If this be bloody and extreme, 
I am content to be so counted with the Holy Ghost." 

§ 3. Repression of Dissent 

The bold challenge to the government which was delivered by 
Cartwright's party in a daring "admonition to the Parliament," 
which demanded the establishment of government by Presbyters, 
raised a panic among English statesmen and prelates which cut 
off all hopes of a quiet appeal to reason. It is probable that, but 
for the storm which Cartwright raised, the steady growth of gen- 
eral discontent with the ceremonial usages he denounced would 
have brought about their abolition. The Parliament of 1571 had 
not only refused to bind the clergy to subscription to three articles 
on the supremacy, the form of church government, and the power 
of the Church to ordain rites and ceremonies, but favored the 
project of reforming the Liturgy by the omission of the, super- 
stitious practices. But with the appearance of the "Admonition" 
this natural progress of opinion abruptly ceased. The moderate 
statesmen who had pressed for a change in ritual withdrew from 
union with a party which revived the worst pretensions of the 
papacy. As dangers from without and from within thickened 
round the queen, the growing Puritanism of the clergy stirred her 
wrath above measure, and she met the growth of "non-conform- 
ing" ministers by a measure which forms the worst blot on her 
reign. 

The new powers which were conferred in 1583 on the Ecclesi- 
astical Commission converted the religious truce into a spiritual 
despotism. From being a temporary board which represented 
the royal supremacy in matters ecclesiastical, the Commission 
was now turned into a permanent body wielding the almost 
unlimited powers of the crown. All opinions or acts contrary to 
the Statutes of Supremacy and Uniformity fell within its cog- 
nizance. A right of deprivation placed the clergy at its mercy. 
It had power to alter or amend the statutes of colleges or schools. 
Not only heresy and schism and non-conformity, but incest or 



The Growth of Puritanism 327 

aggravated adultery were held to fall within its scope; its means 
of inquiry were left without limit, and it might fine or imprison 
at its will. By the mere establishment of such a court half the 
work of the Reformation was undone. The large number of 
civilians on the board indeed seemed to furnish some security 
against the excess of ecclesiastical tyranny. Of its forty-four 
commissioners, however, few actually took any part in its proceed- 
ings; and the powers of the Commission were practically left in 
the hands of the successive primates. No Archbishop of Canter- 
bury since the days of Augustine had wielded an authority so vast, 
so utterly despotic, as that of Whitgift and Bancroft and Abbott 
and Laud. 

The most terrible feature of their spiritual tyranny was its 
wholly personal character. The old symbols of doctrine were 
gone, and the lawyers had not yet stepped in to protect the clergy 
by defining the exact limits of the new. The result was that at 
the commission board at Lambeth the primates created their own 
tests of doctrine with an utter indifference to those created by law. 
In one instance Parker deprived a vicar of his benefice for a 
denial of the verbal inspiration of the Bible. Nor did the suc- 
cessive archbishops care greatly if the test was a varying or a 
conflicting one. Whitgift strove to force on the Church the 
Calvinistic supralapsarianism of his Lambeth Articles. Ban- 
croft, who followed him, was as earnest in enforcing his anti- 
Calvinistic dogma of the divine Right of the episcopate. Abbott 
had no mercy for Arminianism. Laud had none for its opponents. 
It is no wonder that the ecclesiastical Commission, which these 
men represented, soon stank in the nostrils of the English clergy. 
Its establishment, however, marked the adoption of a more resolute 
policy on the part of the crown, and its efforts were backed by 
stern measures of repression. All preaching or reading in private 
houses was forbidden ; and in spite of the refusal of Parliament to 
enforce the requirement of them by law, subscription to the Three 
Articles was exacted from every member of the clergy. 

For the moment these measures were crowned with success. 
The movement under Cartwright was checked ; Cartwright him- 
self was driven from his professorship ; and an outer uniformity 
of worship was more and more brought about by the steady press- 
ure of the Commission. The old liberty which had been allowed 
in London and the other Protestant parts of the kingdom was 
no longer permitted to exist. The leading Puritan clergy, whose 
non-conformity had hitherto been winked at, were called upon to 



328 English Historians 

submit to the surplice, and to make the sign of the cross in bap- 
tism. The remonstrances of the country gentry availed as little 
as the protest of Lord Burleigh himself to protect two hundred of 
the best ministers from being driven from their parsonages on a 
refusal to subscribe to the Three Articles. But the persecution 
only gave fresh life and popularity to the doctrines which it aimed 
at crushing by drawing together two currents of opinion which 
were in themselves perfectly distinct. The Presbyterian plat- 
form of church discipline had as yet been embraced by the clergy 
only, and by few among the clergy. On the other hand, the wish 
of the Puritans for a reform in the Liturgy, the dislike of ''super- 
stitious usages," of the use of the surplice, the sign of the cross in 
baptism, the gift of the ring in marriage, the posture of kneeling 
at the Lord's Supper, was shared by a large number of the clergy 
and laity alike. At the opening of Elizabeth's reign almost all 
the higher churchmen save Parker were opposed to them, and a 
motion in convocation for their abolition was lost by a single vote. 
The temper of the country gentlemen on this subject was indicated 
by that of Parliament; and it was well known that the wisest 
of the queen's councillors, Burleigh, Walsingham, and Knollys, 
were at one in this matter with the gentry. If their common per- 
secution did not wholly succeed in fusing these two sections of 
religious opinion into one, it at any rate gained for the Presby- 
terians a general sympathy on the part of the Puritans, which 
raised them from a clerical clique into a popular party. Nor were 
the consequences of the persecution limited to the strengthening 
of the Presbyterians. 

§ 4. The Development of Independency 

The " Separatists, " who were beginning to withdraw from 
attendance at public worship on the ground that the very existence 
of a national Church was contrary to the Word of God, grew quickly 
from a few scattered zealots to twenty thousand souls. Presby- 
terian and Puritan felt as bitter an abhorrence as Elizabeth her- 
self of the "" Brownists," as they were nicknamed after their founder, 
Robert Brown. Parliament, Puritan as it was, passed a statute 
against them. Brown himself was forced to fly to the Nether- 
lands, and of his followers many were driven into exile. So great 
a future awaited one of these congregations that we may pause to 
get a glimpse of "a poor people" in Lincolnshire and the neigh- 
borhood, who " being enlightened by the Word of God," and their 



The Growth of Puritanism 329 

members " urged with the yoke of subscription," had been led "to 
see further." They rejected ceremonies as relics of idolatry, the 
rule of bishops as unscriptural, and joined themselves, "as the 
Lord's free people," into "a church estate on the fellowship of the 
Gospel." Feeling their way forward to the great principle of 
liberty of conscience, they asserted their Christian right "to walk 
in all the ways which God had made known or should make known 
to them." 

Their meetings or "conventicles" soon drew down the heavy 
hand of the law, and the little company resolved to seek a refuge 
in other lands; but their first attempt at flight was prevented, and 
when they made another, their wives and children were seized 
at the very moment of entering the ship. At last, however, the 
magistrates gave a contemptuous assent to their project; they 
were, in fact, "glad to be rid of them at any price," and the fugi- 
tives found shelter at Amsterdam, from whence some of them, 
choosing John Robinson as their minister, took refuge in 1609 
at Leyden. "They knew they were pilgrims and looked not much 
on these things, but lifted up their eyes to Heaven, their dearest 
country, and quieted their spirits." Among this little band of 
exiles were those who were to become famous at a later time as 
the Pilgrim Fathers of the Mayflower. 

It was easy to be "rid" of the Brownists; but the political 
danger of the course on which the crown had entered was seen 
in the rise of a spirit of vigorous opposition, such as had not made 
its appearance since the accession of the Tudors. The growing 
power of public opinion received a striking recognition in the 
struggle which bears the name of the "Martin Marprelate con- 
troversy." The Puritans had from the first appealed by their 
pamphlets from the crown to the people, and Whitgift bore 
witness to their influence on opinion by his efforts to gag the press. 
The regulations of the Star Chamber for this purpose are mem- 
orable as the first step in the long struggle of government after 
government to check the liberty of printing. The irregular cen- 
sorship which had long existed was now finally organized. Print- 
ing was restricted to London and the two universities, the number 
of printers reduced, and all candidates for license to print were 
placed under the supervision of the Company of Stationers. 
Every publication, too, great or small, had to receive the appro- 
bation of the Primate or the Bishop of London. 

The first result of this system of repression was the appearance, 
in the very year of the Armada, of a series of anonymous pam- 



330 English Historians 

phlets bearing the significant name of "Martin Marpr elate," and 
issued from a secret press which found refuge from the royal 
pursuivants in the country houses of the gentry. The press was 
at last seized ; and the suspected authors of these scurrilous libels, 
Penry, a young Welshman, and a minister named Udall, died, the 
one in prison, the other on the scaffold. But the virulence and 
boldness of their language produced a powerful effect, for it was 
impossible under the system of Elizabeth to "mar" the bishops 
without attacking the crown; and a new age of political liberty 
was felt to be at hand when Martin Marprelate forced the political 
and ecclesiastical measures of the government into the arena of 
public discussion. The suppression, indeed, of these pamphlets 
was far from damping the courage of the Presbyterians. Cart- 
wright, who had been appointed by Lord Leicester to the master- 
ship of an hospital at Warwick, was bold enough to organize his 
system of church discipline among the clergy of that county and 
of Northamptonshire. His example was widely followed, and 
the general gatherings of the whole ministerial body of the clergy 
and the smaller assemblies for each diocese or shire, which in the 
Presbyterian scheme bore the name of synods and classes, began 
to be held in many parts of England for the purposes of debate 
and consultation. The new organization was quickly suppressed, 
indeed, but Cartwright was saved from the banishment which 
Whitgift demanded by a promise of submission; his influence 
steadily increased, and the struggle, transferred to the higher 
sphere of the Parliament, widened into the great contest for liberty 
under James and the civil war under his successor. 

Bibliographical Note 

Marsden, History of the Early Puritans, 2nd ed., 1853. Masson, Life 
of Milton, see Index under title "Puritanism." Illustrative materials in 
Prothero, Statutes and Constitutional Documents. 



PART V 

THE STUART CONSTITUTIONAL CONFLICT 

CHAPTER I 

OPENING OF THE CONSTITUTIONAL STRUGGLE UNDER JAMES I 

Before the death of Queen Elizabeth there were many indica- 
tions that the nation was growing restless under the arbitrary 
practices which characterized Tudor absolutism. The bestowal 
of trade monopolies on private persons had been the subject of 
Parliamentary protest and the queen had promised relief; the 
custom of demanding freedom from arrest and liberty of speech 
for members had been fixed towards the close of her reign; and 
several times Commons had asserted the right of settling disputed 
election questions. Moreover, as we have seen, there were grow- 
ing parties seeking to reform or subvert the Established Church, 
thus coming into conflict with the crown as the chief defender of 
the faith. 

It was under such circumstances that James I ascended the 
throne of England. The number of members that attended the 
meeting of his first Parliament was itself an indication of the in- 
creasing interest of the country in political affairs and the har- 
binger of many a struggle to come. Unfortunately James was 
fitted neither by temper nor training for the task of governing at 
this time when tact and conciliation were indispensable to harmony, 
and at the very outset he initiated the quarrel which was destined 
to fill the seventeenth century with turmoil. 

§ i . James I and the Puritans 1 

In the gray hours of morning, March 24, 1603, watch and 
ward was kept in London streets; and in all the neighboring 

1 Trevelyan, England under the Stuarts, pp. 73 ff. By permission of 
G. M. Trevelyan, Esq., and G. P. Putnam's Sons, Publishers. 



33% English Historians 

counties men who had much at stake in time of crisis wove un- 
certain plans to meet the thousand chances that day might bring. 
For the last and greatest of the Tudor race had at length turned 
away to die, like one of her old Plantagenet ancestry, in fierce mood 
of scorn for the world which her patient valor had led into the 
forward path. Her death would bring about one of those rare 
occasions when the platitudes of national loyalty and unity, which 
have imposed on secure men for a whole generation, are put to 
the test of the event. It would now be seen whether all was really 
as officials asserted it to be; whether the new England had been 
built to stand for ages; or whether, after all, the party of the old 
religion and society was large, united, and determined enough to 
bring down all in ruin. 

When day broke two horsemen were far on the northern road, 
each spurring to forestall the other at Holyrood with homage im- 
patiently expected by the first ruler of the British Isles. At a 
more leisurely pace the Elizabethan statesmen were riding in from 
Richmond, where their mistress lay dead, to Whitehall gate, where 
at ten in the morning they proclaimed King James I. By employ- 
ing as their spokesman Robert Cecil, who personified the late 
queen's system in Church and State, the Lords of the Council 
showed themselves agreed that there should be no revolution. The 
decision was silently indorsed by a grateful nation. In city and 
manor house men laid aside their arms and breathed again. Fast 
as the news spread, all consented and most rejoiced. The Puri- 
tan sailors, who had taken out their ships to guard against Popish 
invasion from the Flemish coast, put back to port ; and the border- 
ers who kept watch on Naworth turrets, learned from their mild 
Catholic lord, Belted Will Howard, that, since England and 
Scotland had one king, the northern sky-line was no longer the 
territory of a foe. So the work of Elizabeth stood the test of real 
consent, and the English people invited the royal line of Scotland 
to come and fill her place. 

The first of these four Stuarts who have left their indelible 
negative impression upon England ushered in the tragedy of 
king and people with a pageant of royal progress from Berwick 
to London, which then excited to ecstasies the loyalty and curi- 
osity of a simple nation, and has since, in the reflex light of all 
that followed, become a theme for the irony of historians. For 
a month of spring weather James rode south. The land seemed 
bursting into bud to welcome him, growing greener each day as 
the ever increasing train of courtiers wound slowly down out of 



The Constitutional Struggle under James I ^33 

the north country into the midland valleys; through shouting 
market-places where the masque of welcome and the corporation 
with its address were lost in the press of men ; by ancient steeples 
rocking with the clash of bells; along open roads hedged with 
countrymen who had come on pilgrimage across whole counties. 
There was hunting of the stag through the neighboring parks, 
when his Majesty might learnedly discourse to the foresters on the 
art of venery, and show how your Scotchman will blow a mort; 
while at night, in private mansions, the regal entertainment wit- 
nessed to the solid magnificence and free loyalty of England. 

The man on whom the English thus first set eyes was by no means 
contemptible in person, in spite of grossly coarse manners. In the 
prime of life, over middle height, a good horseman, devoted to the 
chase, drinking hugely but never overcome by his liquor, he 
employed a pithy wit and a wealth of homely images and learned 
conceits in free and familiar discourse with all. Nor during the 
progress did he dispel the prejudice in his favor. 

Above all he gave satisfaction by keeping Robert Cecil as his 
chief counsellor. He had, in fact, determined to maintain the 
system of Elizabeth, with this good change, — that henceforth the 
royal policy should display an acuteness and a largeness of mind 
worthy of a man of uncommon penetration and learning, who 
knew by theory how to outwit the pope, manage the king of Spain, 
convert the English Catholics by proclamations, and guide his 
other subjects on the path of unity and wisdom. The English 
people having been loyal even to Elizabeth, probably from their 
sense of the obedience due by right divine to all rulers, would be 
doubly loyal to one like himself, the living symbol of justice and 
reconciliation, the " Restorer," as he loved to hear, "of perpetual 
peace in Church and Commonwealth." 

His naturally authoritative temper in politics was flattered 
both by his theories and his experience. His dogma of the Divine 
Right of kings was gleaned from the new theory of State now in 
favor among the monarchies of the Continent, better known to 
him than to his more ignorant and insular English subjects; 
while his experience of Scottish kingship had led him, during the 
years of life when opinions are formed, to see how necessary is 
royal authority to tame a fierce baronage and a frantic clergy. 
But he had devoted none of his studious hours to the department 
of learning that now most concerned him. He knew nothing of 
the peculiar laws and liberties of England, either in the spirit or 
the letter ; he began by ordering a cut-purse who had been caught 



334 English Historians 

preying on the crowd as he passed through Newark to be hanged 
without trial. When too late in life to profit by new knowledge, 
he discovered the existence of constitutional custom and Parlia- 
mentary privilege; he set them down in his logical mind as tire- 
some anomalies hampering government in its benevolent course. 
Nor would he consider local sentiment and English national 
jealousy, except to despise them as forces disintegrating his plans 
of peace and union. 

As a man, James was one whom it is easy to love or to despise, 
but impossible to hate. Though every inch a pedant, he was 
human — far more human than his more noble and reserved suc- 
cessor. His instinct to sympathize warmly, except when annoyed 
or prejudiced, with any one who spoke to him, led to rapid and 
unconscious vacillations in his conduct. The more intimate 
friendships which were a . necessity to his life, counteracted yet 
more disastrously his excellent intentions as a ruler. Choosing 
his favorites for no other merit but their charm as companions, 
he was too fond to deny them anything. Their power for evil 
was the greater, because he himself hated the details of admin- 
istration, and loved to live in the abstract heights of a general 
scheme, oblivious of the monstrous distortions to which a plan is 
liable in action, and the terrible wrongs for which even a love of 
justice, if it despises diligence, can easily be made the cloak. 

Beneath all his carelessness as to the ordering of his court, 
and in seeing to the execution of his commands, lay a will stub- 
bornly adherent to a main course of a policy through years of 
ominous failure, when once he had persuaded himself that king- 
craft required a certain attitude, whether towards Spain, towards 
the Puritans, or towards Parliament. Opposition, even if couched 
in reverent terms, aroused neither his admiration nor his curiosity, 
but only his spleen. Of cruelty, indeed, he had none. An op- 
ponent, especially if a subject, was a pitiable thing to be lectured 
and set aside. If, as in the case of his later Parliaments, oppo- 
sition became too strong, he would resort to concession, but not 
to conciliation or to a change of front. 

His most fatal defect was that, in spite of great acuteness and 
some originality in discovering points of vantage for himself and 
detecting weakness in his adversaries' position, he could never tell 
a good man from a rogue, or a wise man from a fool; still less 
could he distinguish the great currents of opinion and the main 
tide of political force from the bright, shallow eddies that catch 
and please a monarch's eye. The patriotism of Eliot repelled 



The Constitutional Struggle under James I ^3S 

him ; the large political wisdom of Bacon appeared to him a rush- 
light rival to his own royal beam; the daring and unquiet genius 
of Raleigh was opposed alike to his peaceful instincts and his 
pedestrian intellect. Turning from all this varied wealth of ex- 
cellence, he deliberately chose Carr and Villiers. One who thus 
judged of persons, was not likely to understand the real problems 
with which his kingcraft had in fact to deal; to penetrate the soul 
of Puritanism, or to recognize any purpose beyond that of thwart- 
ing good government, in the turbulent faction of the House of 
Commons. 

In the first three years of James' English rule, each of the great 
problems of the coming century took an irrevocable turn. Against 
Puritans and against Parliament the king adopted in 1604 a 
position from which his stubborn character afterwards forbade 
him to retreat, and, by the time his son succeeded him, the con- 
tinuous traditions of a long reign had established this principle 
as the very first of royal policy. In the same year, 1604, by mak- 
ing a wise peace with Spain, he prepared the way for his foolish 
friendship with Catholic powers which soon alienated nationalist 
feeling from the throne. In the winter of 1605 his attempt to 
secure the loyalty of the Papists by holding out alternately the 
olive branch and the sword ended in the Gunpowder treason; 
the event gave only a momentary impulse to the ever vacillating 
conduct of the Stuart monarchs towards their Catholic subjects, 
but it excited popular imagination to a panic which lasted with 
slight intermissions for more than a century. Thus all the main 
causes that twice combined to drive the Stuarts from the throne 
were in three fatal years set in motion by an overwise king. 

Already during his progress from Scotland the new king had 
been met by the " Millenary Petition," presented by several hun- 
dred conformist Puritan clergy, in the hope that the doubtful 
toleration afforded them within the Elizabethan establishment, 
might under the new regime be changed for a secure and legal- 
ized comprehension. They were serving the Episcopal Church 
with sufficient loyalty to her form of government and her Prayer- 
book service, and with a missionary zeal and a pastoral energy 
to which no other section could pretend. In return they now asked, 
not for supremacy, but for security. The petitioners suggested 
that a clergyman should be allowed to choose for himself whether 
he would wear cap and surplice, and that he should not be re- 
quired to declare his belief in the absolute truth of the whole Prayer 
Book, provided he signed the Articles and used the service. The 



336 English Historians 

royal reply would be a test of much besides ; if the new king was 
ready to tolerate Puritanism within the pale of the national Church, 
he would be ready to leave these points optional. 

Other items of the Millenary Petition — the disuse of the sign 
of the cross in baptism and the bowing at the name of Jesus, the 
abridgment of the service, the simplification of music and chant- 
ing, the encouragement of preaching and sermons, the prevention 
of ecclesiastical pluralities and sinecures, the observance of Sun- 
day, the non-observance of saints' days — were such as a wise 
monarch might have refused or left unanswered, on the ground 
than any strict order favoring the Puritans on these points would 
give offence to many clergy and to many congregations. But the 
moderation of even these requests, so different from the demand 
for the abolition of the episcopate haughtily advanced thirty years 
before, show the humble and conformist spirit of Puritanism at 
this auspicious moment, which James the peacemaker was fated 
to throw away. 

In January, 1604, the king presided at Hampton Court over a 
conference summoned to consider the Petition. The bishops 
came up determined to oppose all compromise. As the death 
struggle against Catholicism gave ever more apparent promise of 
triumph, the Protestant zeal originally shown by Elizabeth's 
bishops had begun to cool; and when Cartwright had made his 
Presbyterian attack on their authority, they had grafted on to 
their Erastian pride of church office under the crown the yet 
loftier pretension that episcopal government is of Divine origin. 
Bancroft, Bishop of London, the champion of the new theory, 
took the lead at Hampton Court. On the second day of the 
session, when the principal demands of the Millenary Petition 
were to be discussed, he began . by asking James to silence the 
Puritan divines on the high ground that Canon Law forbade 
schismatics to be heard against their bishops, and then tried to 
raise a silly laugh against the " Turkey gowns" in which the good 
men had thought fit to appear at the conference. But James was 
not going to lose the chance of a disputation. Rebuking Ban- 
croft's unfairness, he assumed the part of the good-humored 
and talkative umpire of debate, hearing all in full, but deciding 
point after point against the Puritan spokesman, Dr. Reynolds. 
The session, however, came to a more stormy close. Reynolds 
proposed that the lower clergy should have the right of meeting 
in conference, and that the bishop should consult the synod of 
the diocese. At the word synod, redolent to James of the daily 



The Constitutional Struggle under James I 337 

humiliations of his youth among the rude lieutenants of Knox, 
the petulance which was always chafing under the crust of his learn- 
ing and wisdom burst out in loose native fury. "If you aim at a 
Scottish Presbytery," he cried, "it agreeth as well with a mon- 
archy as God and the Devil." Seizing up his hat to dismiss the 
assembly, he poured out, in a strain of colloquial epigram, the 
secret of the personal passion that dictated his policy: "How they 
used the poor lady, my mother, is not unknown, and how they dealt 
with me in my minority. I thus apply it. . . . No bishop, no 
king. . . . Well, Doctor, have you anything more to say?" — 
"No more, if it please your Majesty." "If this be all your party 
hath to say, I will make them conform themselves, or else will 
harry them out of the land." "In two minutes," as Gardiner 
says, "he had sealed his own fate and that of England forever." 

On many points James was not out of sympathy with the Puri- 
tans. Unlike Charles I, he was not brought up in the atmosphere 
of Anglicanism; he cared nothing for ritual; he was a Calvinist 
in doctrine, and when he first entered England he was anxious 
to promote in his half-Catholic kingdom the pastoral and mis- 
sionary propaganda which the Puritans alone carried on, in spite 
of episcopal discouragement. He had wished to settle endow- 
ments for the maintenance of preachers, until Archbishop Whit- 
gift persuaded him that much preaching was a dangerous inno- 
vation. But the one point on which he differed completely from 
the Puritans was the relative authority of the bishops and their 
clergy. It was, in fact, not for speculative nor religious, but for 
political, reasons that he disliked the Puritans. ' He saw in them 
the sect that in Scotland had made his youth one long humiliation, 
his manhood one long struggle — men who would take the Lord's 
Anointed by the sleeve and call him "God's silly vassal." The 
English Puritans were at this stage of their career of a milder 
temper; but the policy of suppression by which James thought to 
"harry them out of the land" served to arouse in them the in- 
stincts which he most feared, and led them indeed to abolish bishops 
and to put his son to death. 

When his first Parliament met in the spring of 1604, the House 
of Commons supported the Millenary Petition and the arguments 
of Dr. Reynolds. It escaped the king how ominous was the alli- 
ance ; how considerable the fact that the flustered divines who had 
picked up their Turkey gowns and scurried from his presence 
amid the laughter of bishops represented the religion of the 
gentry and the towns of England. Such considerations gave him 



33% English Historians 

no pause. It was enough for him to lecture Parliament on "Puri- 
tans and Novelists," " which I call a sect rather than a religion," 
"who do not so far differ from us in points of religion as in their 
confused form of policy and parity." In that sentence James 
summed up the mistake of his life. Because the Puritan leaders 
of the previous generation had desired a Presbyterian "policy" 
of church government, and a "parity" of clergy with their bishops, 
therefore the services and merits of all Puritans were to be over- 
looked; they were at once to be deprived of their benefices, and 
finally, together with all their lay adherents, "harried out of the 
land." James did not perceive that if they were allowed to con- 
tinue their work in the Church and to take their fair place on the 
episcopal bench, the desire for "parity" would be kept in the 
background; while on the other hand, if they were driven out by 
the bishops, the Presbyterian "policy" would revive, with the arm 
of the House of Commons for its support. 

As soon as Parliament had risen in July, the king informed the 
clergy by proclamation that unless before December they were ready 
to conform to all existing rules of church service, they "Would 
then be deprived of their livings. When the fatal month came 
round, Bancroft himself, elevated to the See of Canterbury, as a 
new broom to sweep the Church clean, eagerly set himself to carry 
out the orders of the king's council. All curates and unbeneficed 
preachers were required to sign a statement that the Prayer Book 
contained nothing contrary to the Word of God ; and the beneficed 
clergy, while excused this severer test, were required to obey the 
rubric in every detail. Three hundred refused and were ejected. 
Many of the most influential and conscientious of the servants of 
the Church were driven to the position of sectarians. Till then, 
the only schism from the English Church had been the voluntary 
secession of the Brownists and a few other protomartyrs of the 
Congregational system, who were hated by the average Puritan 
almost as much as by the bishops. But now an important group 
of churchmen, forcibly expelled, gathered round them large con- 
gregations of admirers. The "silenced brethren," as they were 
called, became a living reproach to the numerous Puritan clergy 
who remained in the Church, a witness of the honors of martyr- 
dom and the injustice of episcopal government. This, the first 
of the great ejections for conscience' sake that mark the history 
of the reformed English Church, began a cycle of revolutionary 
tests, which after weeding out in turn the more scrupulous cham- 
pions of Puritanism and of Anglicanism, at the end of a hundred 



The Constitutional Struggle under James I 339 

years left the Vicar of Bray as the type of an English clergyman in 
the eighteenth century. . . . 

§ 2. The English Parliament in the Seventeenth Century 

The forms and functions of the English Parliament were derived 
from mediaeval origins. The baron, able, when he chose, to let 
war loose over the land from his castle-yard, consented to spare 
his country so long as he was compensated with an hereditary 
share in the counsels of State. The gentleman, the burgess, and 
the yeoman, in days when the central power could do little to 
strengthen the hands of the tax collector against the passive 
resistance of a scattered population, consented to fill the royal 
treasury, so long as they were consulted as to the amount and re- 
assured as to the necessity of the royal demands. Such was the 
original meaning of the House of Lords and of the House of 
Commons. 

The Tudors retained the forms but altered the significance of 
our Parliamentary institutions. By destroying the barons and 
their armies, the king removed the only political power that could 
presume to name his ministries or dictate his policy. Having 
thus enslaved the Lords, he could safely make use of the Lower 
House. Urged and directed by the Tudor monarchs, the Com- 
mons entered into a career of legislative activity for which there 
had been no scope in the more conservative ages gone by. As the 
royal instrument of religious and social reconstruction, they gained 
prestige while they lost independence. At a time when the Habs- 
burgs and Valois were jealously trenching on the ancient liberties 
of their Cortez and £tats Generaux, the English Parliament pre- 
served its privileges and increased its functions by becoming part 
of the theory and practice of English absolutism. 

In the days of the Plantagenet and Lancastrian dynasties, Par- 
liament acted as opposition. But in those days it had been the 
peers who stirred up the Commons to criticise the king's finance, 
and protected them when they impeached his servants. When, 
therefore, the military power of the Lords had been destroyed in 
the Wars of the Roses, the element of opposition disappeared from 
both houses together. During the century that divided the battle 
of Bosworth from the defeat of the Armada, the Commons, while 
they forgot how to resist the king, learnt to be independent of 
the Lords. In the last years of Elizabeth, signs of a revival of 
opposition came not from the Upper but from the Lower House; 



340 English Historians 

under the management of James, the Commons developed a new 
tradition of political resistance, under a new class of leaders, and 
created constitutional precedents more novel in reality than they 
were in law. 

The House of Commons represented all the independent classes, 
not as separate and jealous ''estates," but as friendly partners 
in a common political heritage. The farmer and agricultural 
laborer, since they enjoyed no social independence, exercised no 
political franchise. But yeomen freeholders, though they seldom 
if ever aspired to sit in Parliament, decided by their votes between 
the knights, squires, and baronets, who courted them hat in hand 
on market days, when the writs were travelling down from Lon- 
don. The yeomen were devotedly attached to the privileges of 
Parliament, and the principle of no taxation without representa- 
tion : these watchwords were specially associated with their class 
pride as freeholders. As Fuller quaintly expresses it, the yeoman 

"hath a great stroke in making a Knight of the shire. Good reason, for 
he makes a whole line in the Subsidy book, not caring how much his purse 
is let blood, so it be done by the advice of the physicians of State." 

But the feature most distinctive of the English Parliament was 
the method of mutual accommodation by which the gentry and 
the burgesses shared between them the anomalous representative 
system. The life and the wealth of England were to be found 
chiefly in the farm and the manor house, yet the Chamber that 
represented her opinion contained only ninety-two members for the 
counties, and some four hundred members for the towns. And 
yet, in practice, the country gentlemen were well represented, for 
it was they who sat for the boroughs. In the official returns of 
each Parliament we only find the name of a score of "merchants," 
"aldermen," "recorders," and "mayors"; the remaining three 
hundred and fifty and odd borough members, with the exception 
of a few "sergeants-at-law," are entitled "baronets," "knights," 
"esquires," and "gentlemen." Although a certain number of the 
boroughs were Cornish villages in the hands of the crown or of 
private landowners, the proportion was not in the seventeenth 
century large; the bulk of the elections were genuine contests. 
Corruption of voters by money was not so general as it afterward 
became, but the power of great neighboring families was felt in the 
smaller towns, sometimes, probably in a very sinister manner. 
But in many cases the English burghers deliberately preferred to 
look outside their own class for a member. Except the men of 
London, Bristol, and Plymouth, who usually chose one of their 



The Constitutional Struggle under James I 341 

merchant princes, the shopkeepers considered that the privileges 
of Parliament were treated with more respect and their own in- 
terests with more attention, when the market towns of Bucking- 
hamshire sent up such neighbors as the Verneys and the Hampdens, 
and the cities of Yorkshire spoke through a Wentworth or a Beau- 
mont, a Cholmeley or a Fairfax. Nor did the English gentleman, 
like the French noble, scorn the political alliance of the "third 
estate"; but rather, in the pursuit of social estimation among his 
own equals, valued, next to representing the yeomen as county 
member, the scarcely inferior honor of sitting for the capital of 
the shire. So long as this mutual accommodation prevailed, the 
English chambers would not perish, like those of continental states, 
by the division of classes. 

The pick of the country gentlemen, sent by far-distant com- 
munities to act together for a few weeks in St. Stephen's Chapel, 
came up uncorrupted by previous contact with Vanity Fair. 
Except the lawyers resident at the Inns of Court, the members 
knew no more of London than that the merchants were honest 
men, and no more of Whitehall than that the courtiers were false 
knaves. The character and public spirit of the Commons under 
James and Charles I were higher than in those subsequent periods 
of our history, when the Parliament men began to reside for a large 
part of each year on the scene of their more protracted labors, 
instituted a "London Season," haunted the court, and aspired to 
posts under the crown. 

Until the Long Parliament the members had no thought of 
obtaining office. The edge was not taken off their patriotism by 
fear of losing favor at court, nor was the spirit of inquiry smothered 
by that indifference to scandals and to blunders which is fostered 
by fashionable society and by official routine. As an opposition, 
no assembly of men at once so shrewd and so stalwart ever met to 
resist the abuse of power. But this homely ignorance of the great 
world, while it fortified their character as men, limited their out- 
look as politicians. They knew so little of the details of foreign 
affairs, of the cost of wars, of the preparation of armaments, that 
while they justly condemned they were unable to correct the haute 
politique of Buckingham. Fortunately, what the time required 
of them was not an alternative national policy, but the protection 
of national liberties ; for that task the English squires were fitted 
by their birth, their traditions, and the freshness of mind with 
which they came to each new Parliament from hunting deer, 
interviewing bailiffs, and assessing poor-rates. Hundreds of for- 



342 English Historians 

gotten men, who during the Parliaments of forty years succeeded 
each other on the benches beside Coke, Eliot, Wentworth, Hyde, 
and Pym, brought to the help of England a type of character that 
never reappeared in our history, — directness of intention and 
simplicity of mind, the inheritance of modest generations of active 
and hearty rural life ; now at last informed by Elizabethan culture ; 
and now at last spiritualized by a Puritan religion. 

English local life was the source and safeguard of English liberty, 
which Parliament only concentrated and expressed. During the 
abeyance of Parliamentary opposition, the caprice of the Tudor 
monarchs had been restrained by the knowledge that any one shire 
could assert its cause by a rebellion, and that, since no standing 
army existed, such a rebellion could only be suppressed if the other 
districts were in a temper to march to the aid of the central gov- 
ernment. In the reign of James I the House of Commons again 
became the focus of local opinions, which otherwise would never 
have united into a national policy. The isolated communities of 
England, divided from each other by days of riding on steep and 
muddy roads, uninformed by newspapers, and perplexed by strange 
tales about poisoners and papists at the court, could only rely, for 
credible information and sober opinion, on the men whom they 
sent up to Parliament to inquire into these matters on the spot. 
The Norfolk parson, who distrusted "light scoffing wits not apt 
to deeper search," records in his diary that he would have been 
"free from all harder censure " of the Duke of Buckingham, "but 
that the Parliament did so oppose him." The Commons, knowing 
their speeches to be the sole voice and their resolutions the sole 
instruction of a politically minded nation, would not even com- 
promise on the greatest of the privileges of Parliament, free 
speech within the walls of the House. And very free speech it 
was. Foreigners, accustomed to the secret intrigues of Paris and 
the silent obedience of Madrid, censured the boldness but envied 
the impunity of the Opposition, when some country gentleman, 
who had ridden up a few days before from his home beyond the 
Dorset Downs, rose in his seat to abuse the highest minister of 
state, and was suffered to walk back unmolested through the dark- 
ening streets to his lodgings in Holborn. It was only when the 
session had ended that the king dared to lay by the heels a few 
of the boldest speakers. 

The Commons well knew what had happened to representative 
bodies in other lands. Foreign ambassadors lodged complaints 
of the abuse showered upon their masters, who were described in 



The Constitutional Struggle under James I 343 

the House as " overthrowing the Parliaments throughout Christen- 
dom," and reducing their subjects by arbitrary taxation to "wear 
only wooden shoes on their feet." "England," cried the member 
for Somerset, "is the last monarchy that yet retains her liberties. 
Let them not perish now ! " The Commons therefore knew that 
they must look, not to the "rights of nations" or to any theories 
of government prevalent in that age, but to definite laws and cus- 
toms peculiar to England. As historians they unearthed a period 
in English history from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, 
when Parliament had controlled the counsels of the crown; and 
as lawyers they pleaded statutes of the same period, which forbade 
the encroachments of royal power in specific matters, such as the 
imposition of particular kinds of taxation. Thus an antiquarian 
revival, instituted by several hundred of the most hard-headed men 
in the country, decided the future of our island. The partisans of 
absolutism pleaded the equally valid Tudor precedents, and 
demonstrated that even in the Middle Ages the custom of the 
Constitution had by no means always followed the statutes, in 
which the Parliaments had but recorded claims never heartily 
allowed by the king. 

§ 3. James I and Parliament 

The theoretical basis and the legal limits of Parliamentary 
privilege and royal prerogative, questions wisely left to sleep by 
the late queen and her loving subjects, occupied the full attention 
of James' first Parliament which, after sitting for four sessions over 
a space of six years, was "broken" in 16 10 to make way for the 
first long period of unparliamentary Stuart despotism. 

The king was the first to open the high debate. The light head 
of the scholar was turned by the new wine of an absolutist theory 
of government, as alien to the mediaeval English Constitution, as 
were the later theories of "King Pym" and "Freeborn John 
Lilburne." The claim of the pope as vicar of Christ to depose 
sovereigns had driven the champions of Protestant monarchies to 
invent a rival dogma. A divine right was asserted to be inherent 
in kings: not acquired, as the Jesuits taught, by clerical or by 
popular consent, but by heredity. James, as divine hereditary 
sovereign, made haste to state his claims to an authority that would 
have flattered the pride of the Castilian monarch: 

The state of monarchy (he told his first Parliament) is the supremest 
thing upon earth; for kings are not only God's lieutenants upon earth and 
sit upon God's throne, but even by God Himself they are called Gods. 



344 English Historians 

Hence there was no place for constitutional discussion of a pre- 
rogative that had no limits. 

As to dispute what God may do is blasphemy, so it is sedition in subjects to 
dispute what a king may do in the height of his power. I will not be content 
that my power be disputed on. 

The House of Commons, so he told its members, " derived all 
matters of privilege from him"; it sat, not in its own right, but 
of his grace. 

The sudden challenge was taken up at once and by the whole 
House. There was no Royalist party in St. Stephen's before the 
Long Parliament; nor, beyond the king's own servants, did any 
section of any class in the country believe in the theory of divine 
right as applied by James. The members of his first House of 
Commons, with unanimity, recorded their solemn dissent from the 
royal utterances. When in the first session his Majesty asserted 
that Parliamentary privilege was not of right but of grace, they 
told him that he had been " misinformed," and when in the last 
he challenged their right to discuss the limits of his prerogative, 
they replied : — 

We hold it an ancient, general, and undoubted right of Parliament to 
debate freely all matters which properly concern the subject and his right 
or state; which freedom of debate being once foreclosed, the essence of the 
liberty of Parliament is withal dissolved. 

The new claims of personal authority advanced by the Stuarts 
were connected with new plans for national efficiency. Their best 
servants, Salisbury, Bacon, and Strafford, saw, like Richelieu, 
that a country must be equipped with the machinery of central- 
ized government and of productive taxation if she was to keep her 
place in the modern world. James and Charles I aimed at union 
with Scotland, a good army, and a new system of finance. In every 
one of these objects they were defeated, partly by their own lack 
of economy and administrative talent, partly by the resistance of 
the Commons, who opposed the strengthening of the central power 
as dangerous to local and Parliamentary rights. That danger 
would pass away as soon as the central power became representa- 
tive. In the reigns of William III and Anne, the Whig ministers 
carried out the schemes of James I, — united, taxed, and armed 
Great Britain, and so enabled her in the eighteenth century to 
take a place in the world's politics higher than that of countries 
which had purchased a brief period of efficiency by a lasting 
sacrifice of their freedom. . . . 



The Constitutional Struggle under James I 345 

But it was impossible to neglect for a hundred years the need for 
a more productive system of taxation, a problem which, after the 
death of the parsimonious queen, continually returned to vex and 
embroil kings with their Parliaments. Elizabeth had waged the 
most serious of England's wars with a revenue no larger than that 
which James exhausted in time of peace. At slight expense to 
herself and her subjects, she had presided over a court, corrupt 
indeed, but famous to all ages for wisdom in politics and for ex- 
cellence in literature; James, at a vast charge to the nation, main- 
tained a court no less corrupt, but notorious for folly and lack of 
taste. When the king realized that he was spending at the rate 
of from ^500,000 to ^600,000 a year, and thereby incurring an 
annual deficit of from ^50,000 to £150,000, he was the more will- 
ing to exert to the utmost all the prerogative rights of the crown 
which could bring in a revenue. 

The regulation of trade with foreign countries, by impositions 
of duties at the ports, and by the grant or sale of trading monopo- 
lies, was a power that rested, by the custom of the Tudor queens, 
not with Parliament, but with the crown. It had hitherto been 
regarded rather as an administrative function than as a financial 
advantage, but the increasing volume of English trade enabled 
the needy James to find in it a source of large and independent 
revenue. The Book of Rates which he issued was an attempt to 
systematize the import duties on many various articles; and the 
commercial and financial policy involved in the tariff was de- 
termined by the Privy Council Commissioners of Trade, afterward 
turned by Charles I into a council of trade. In 1606 the resist- 
ance of a merchant named Bate to a new form of these duties 
brought the whole question of impositions before the judges, who 
decided that the king had acted within his legal rights. The 
Commons, not yet aware of all the points at issue between them- 
selves and the crown, paid no attention to the matter in the follow- 
ing session of 1608; but in the two sessions of 16 10 they realized 
that the power of the purse, the chief safeguard of their liberties, 
would slip from them as trade increased, unless this right to lay 
impositions was at once challenged. A vigorous controversy 
ensued. Statutes of Edward I, clearly prohibiting the levy of 
duties without consent of Parliament, were quoted in the House; 
while the crown lawyers advanced Tudor precedent, and Tudor 
statutes that implied the existence of the right. The question, 
still undecided, became merged in all the other questions at issue 
between Parliament and king. 



346 English Historians 

Side by side with the controversy over impositions, a friendly 
negotiation was being conducted to put the whole financial system 
on a new footing. The Great Contract, which Salisbury attempted 
to make with Parliament, was to commute the antiquated and 
vexatious feudal rights of the crown for a permanent settlement of 
£200,000 a year, which, together with the other sources of income, 
should have met the annual expenditure of £600,000. Both sides 
were desirous of coming to such terms as would at once supply the 
financial needs of England, and put an end to the use of preroga- 
tive powers to raise money without Parliament ; for James would 
on these terms forego his right to impositions. 

But at the last moment religious and political misunderstanding 
prevented financial agreement. As early as 1604 the Commons 
had protested against the deprivation of their favorite clergy, the 
three hundred silenced Puritan pastors. As the sessions came and 
went, the complaints on this head were strengthened by others, 
touching all points of the religious question, — the imperfect en- 
forcement of the penal laws ; non-residence, so common with the 
inefficient type of incumbents favored by the bishops; and the 
swelling pride shown by those prelates to all classes of men in their 
ecclesiastical courts. James, always in arms to defend the epis- 
copal power, was still more indignant to find his Parliaments seek- 
ing to interfere in his own management of the Church. The 
Great Contract was broken off through mutual suspicion, the dis- 
pute on impositions was left undecided, and finally, in February, 
161 1, the Houses were dissolved. The king determined hence- 
forth to carry on affairs free from the vexatious cavilling of a 
Parliament. 

Bibliographical Note 

Gardiner, History of England, 1 603-1 642, Vols. I and II, consult table 
of contents. Ranke, History of England, Vol. I, pp. 359 ff. Hallam, Con- 
stitutional History of England, Vol. I, chap. vi. For documents and illus- 
trative materials, consult Prothero, Statutes and Constitutional Documents. 



CHAPTER II 

THE PARLIAMENTARY CRISIS OF 1 629 

The constitutional conflict initiated during the reign of James I 
was renewed under his son Charles I. Parliament opposed the 
counsellors whom he chose as his advisers, resented his favor to 
Catholics, and refused to grant the sums he demanded without 
redress of grievances. After two unsuccessful attempts at secur- 
ing the desired grants, Charles resorted to forced loans, to billet- 
ing soldiers on householders without their consent, and to other 
irritating practices. Still in need of money, he gave way to his 
Parliament in 1628 and signed the Petition of Right. This con- 
cession did not settle the dispute, however, for the question as to 
whether tonnage and poundage could be levied without specific 
grant led to further troubles in Parliament which were compli- 
cated by religious difficulties. The stout resistance of Parliament 
induced the king to order an adjournment in March, 1629, and 
shortly afterward a dissolution. Then began the eleven years of 
government without Parliament, which paved the way for the 
revolution. 

§ 1 . Contest over the Right of A djournment l 

As was expected, when the morning of March 2 came, the 
speaker, Sir John Finch, declared the king's pleasure that the 
House should be adjourned to the 10th. He then put the formal 
question to which, under such circumstances, a negative had never 
been returned. Shouts of "No!" "No!" rose on every side. 
Eliot rose, as if to speak to the question of adjournment. Finch 
did his best to check him. He had, he said, an absolute command 

1 Gardiner, History of England, 1 603-1 642, Vol. VII, pp. 67 ff. By per- 
mission of Messrs. Longmans, Green, & Company, Publishers. 

347 



348 English Historians 

from his Majesty instantly to leave the chair if any one attempted 
to speak. 

The question of the right of adjournment thus brought to an 
issue was not beyond dispute. The king had again and again 
directed adjournments. The Lords had always considered the 
command as binding. The Commons had been accustomed to 
adjourn themselves in order to avoid the appearance of submis- 
sion to the king's authority, though they had never refused to 
comply with his wishes. 

Eliot had made up his mind that the time had arrived when the 
House ought to make a practical use of the right of self-adjourn- 
ment which he claimed for it. As Finch moved to leave the chair, 
Denzil Holies and Benjamin Valentine stepped forward, seized 
him by the arms, and thrust him back into his seat. May and 
Edmondes, with the other privy councillors present, hurried to his 
assistance. For a moment he broke away from his captors. But 
his triumph was short. Crowds of members barred the way, and 
Holies and Valentine seized him again and pushed him back into 
his seat. " God's wounds!" cried Holies, "you shall sit till we 
please to rise." Physical force was clearly not on Finch's side, 
and he made no further effort to escape. 

As soon as quiet had been restored Eliot's voice was heard claim- 
ing for the House the right to adjourn itself. His Majesty, he 
went on to say, must have been misinformed, or had been led to 
believe that they had "trenched too far upon the power of sover- 
eignty." They had done nothing unjust, and as the king was 
just, there could be no difference between them. A short declara- 
tion of their intentions had been prepared, which he asked to be 
allowed to put to the question. 

Eliot spoke from the highest bench at the back of the House, 
and he threw the paper forward in order that some one in front 
might hand it to the clerk to be read even if the speaker refused 
his 'consent to its reading. Shouts of " Read ! " "Read!" were 
raised in the midst of a confused struggle. The crowd swayed 
backward and forward around the chair. In the midst of the 
excited throng, Coryton struck one of his fellow members. The 
speaker defended his rights. He knew no instance, he said, in 
which the House had continued to transact business after a com- 
mand from his Majesty to adjourn. "What would any of you 
do," he added plaintively, "if you were in my place? Let not 
my desire to serve you faithfully be my ruin." 

There was no room for the suggestion that the speaker was not 



The Parliamentary Crisis of 1629 349 

properly authorized to order the adjournment. He had the com- 
mand, he said, from the king's own lips. Eliot rejoined that they 
were quite ready to adjourn in obedience to his Majesty, but the 
declaration must first be read. Strode in a few words acknowledged 
the reason for this persistency. "I desire the same," he said, "that 
we may not be turned off like scattered sheep, as we were at the 
end of the last session, and have a scorn put on us in print, but 
that we may leave something behind us." They wished that their 
voice should be heard as a rallying cry to the nation in the con- 
flict which had begun. 

One after another rose to urge upon the speaker the duty of 
obeying the order of the House. The order of the House, said 
Eliot, would be sufficient to excuse him with the king. If he re- 
fused obedience, he should be called to the bar. 

At this intimation of defiance of the king's command, some 
members rose to leave the House. Orders were at once given to 
the sergeant-at-arms to shut the door, that no tales might be car- 
ried to those who were outside. The sergeant-at-arms hesitated 
to obey, and Sir Miles Hobart, at his own suggestion, was directed 
to close the doors. He swiftly turned the lock and put the key in 
his pocket. 

As soon as order was restored, Finch's voice was heard once 
more. To be called to the bar, he said, was one of the greatest 
miseries which could befall him. Then, after a few words from 
others, he begged to be allowed to go to the king, as in the last 
session. He had done them no ill-offices then, and he would do 
them none now. "If I do not return, and that speedily," he 
ended by saying, "tear me in pieces." 

Cries of "Ay!" and "No!" showed that there was a division 
of opinion. Eliot again threatened the speaker with the conse- 
quences of persisting in his refusal. No man, he said, had ever 
been blasted in that House, "but a curse at length fell upon him." 
He asked that his paper might be returned to him. He would 
read it himself, that the House and the world might know the 
loyalty of the affections of those who had prepared it. Before 
the paper was returned, Strode made one more effort to have the 
question regularly put. "You have protested yourself," he said 
to the speaker, " to be our servant, but if you do not what we com 
mand you, that protestation of yours is but a compliment. The 
Scripture saith, 'His servants ye are whom ye obey.' If you will 
not obey us, you are not our servant." 

Finch's position was indeed a hard one. Elected by the Com- 



350 English Historians 

mons, but with a tacit regard to a previous selection by the king, 
the speaker had hitherto served as a link between the crown and 
the House over which he presided. In Elizabeth's days it had 
been easy for a speaker to serve two masters. It was no longer 
possible now. The strain of the breaking constitution fell upon 
him. "I am not the less the king's servant," he said, piteously, 
" for being yours. I will not say I will not put the reading of the 
paper to the question, but I must say, I dare not." 

§ 2. ElioVs Denunciatory Speech 

Upon this final refusal Eliot raised his voice. He told his 
hearers, silent enough now, how religion had been attacked ; how 
Arminianism was the pioneer to popery ; how there was a power 
above the law which checked the magistrates in the execution of 
justice. Those who exercised this power had been the authors 
of the interruptions in this place, whose guilt and fear of punish- 
ment had cast the House upon the rocks. Amongst these evil 
councillors were some prelates of the Church, such as in all ages 
have been ready for innovation and disturbance, though at this 
time more than any. Them he denounced as enemies to his 
Majesty. And behind them stood another figure more base and 
sinister still. The lord treasurer (Weston) himself was the prime 
agent of iniquity. "I fear," continued Eliot, "in his person is 
contracted the very root and principle of these evils. I find him 
building upon the old grounds and foundations which were built 
by the Duke of Buckingham, his great master. His counsels, I 
am doubtful, begat the sad issue of the last session, and from this 
cause that unhappy conclusion came." Not only was Weston 
"the head of all the papists," and the root of all the dangers to 
which religion was exposed, but the course which he had taken in 
the question of tonnage and poundage had been adopted from 
a deliberate design of subverting the trade of the country, and in 
the end of subverting the government. When commerce had been 
ruined, and the wooden walls of England were no longer in exist- 
ence, the state would be at the mercy of its neighbors. "These 
things," cried Eliot, "would have been made more apparent if 
time had been for it, and I hope to have time to do it yet." 

Once more Eliot's lightly kindled imagination had played him 
false. The charge of deliberate treason was as unfounded as it 
was improbable. In the wild excitement of that day everything 
seemed credible to him ; and the proud confidence of his bearing 



The Parliamentary Crisis of 1629 351 

stamped upon his listening auditors the firm assurance that he 
was not dealing his shafts at random. At last, turning to the 
paper which he held in his hand, he briefly explained its meaning. 
" There is in this paper," he said, "a protestation against those 
persons that are innovators in religion, against those that are 
introducers of any new customs, and a protestation against those 
that shall execute such commands for tonnage and poundage, 
and a protestation against merchants that, if any merchant shall 
pay any such duties, he as all the rest shall be as capital enemies 
of the state, and whensoever we shall sit here again, if I be here — 
as I think I shall — I will deliver myself more at large, and fall 
upon the person of that man." 

Eliot had made known what the contents of the paper were; 
but unless his resolutions could be formally put by the speaker, 
they would not go forth as more than the expression of his private 
opinion. Coryton urged that it would be for the king's advantage 
that the paper should be read. He had need of help from the 
House, and those persons that had been named kept it from him. 
The members had come there with a full resolution to grant not 
merely tonnage and poundage, but all other necessary supplies as 
well. Shouts of "All !" "All !" encouraged Coryton to proceed. 
"Shall every man," he said, "that hath broken the law have the 
liberty to pretend the king's commands?" Ought that transcen- 
dent court, highest of all others, to permit the laws to be broken ? 
"Therefore," he ended, "I shall move that his Majesty may be 
moved from this House to advise with his grave and learned 
council, and to leave out those that have been here noted to be ill 
councillors both for the king and kingdom." 

There was one in that assembly whose ears tingled with shame 
and indignation. Jerome Weston, the lord treasurer's eldest 
son, stood up to defend his father. "We have here in considera- 
tion," he said, "human laws which, as they be many, so there is 
one eternal law of God, that we should love our neighbors as our- 
selves. Now, what can be more unjust than, without true grounds, 
to lay aspersions upon a noble person ? Would any of us think it 
just to be done to ourselves? Let not the lord treasurer be pre- 
judged. He has as faithful a heart to Church and commonwealth 
as any man sitting here." 

Then, as now, the House of Commons was wisely tolerant of 
divergence of opinion, especially when it was prompted by do- 
mestic affection. Even in that supreme hour of conflict the call 
was not altogether without effect. The reckless- Clement Coke, 



2$1 English Historians 

indeed, struck the blow home. "Whoever," he said, "laid ton- 
nage and poundage on the people without the gift of Parliament 
is an enemy to the commonwealth, and that this great person has 
done this, there are not light suspicions only upon him, but ap- 
parent proofs." But Eliot was not so entirely thrown off his 
balance as to assume guilt which had not been proved. He had 
no intention, he declared, of asking the House to take his asser- 
tions as evidence. He hoped to be allowed to produce his proofs 
when they met again. 

§ 3. The Passage of the Resolution 

The discussion threatened to become endless for want of definite 
aim. Selden brought it back to the original issue by telling the 
speaker once more that he was bound to put the question. If he 
refused, they had in him a master instead of a servant. He would 
virtually abdicate his office, and they ought then to proceed to the 
choice of another speaker. For the present Selden contented 
himself with moving that Eliot should take the chair and put the 
resolutions to the House. 

An unexpected obstacle arose. Eliot having, as it would seem, 
despaired of obtaining a formal vote upon his resolutions, had 
thrown the paper in the fire. "I think," said Holies, reasonably 
enough, "that gentleman hath done very ill to burn that paper." 
Eliot gracefully submitted to the correction. "I give that gentle- 
man great thanks for reproving me for the burning of that paper, 
and of all obligations that have passed between us I hold this 
for the greatest." With the exception of a formal motion made 
shortly afterward, these words of courtesy were the last utterance 
of the high-souled man within the walls of the House of Commons. 

Whatever was to be done must be done speedily. As Holies 
rose, a knocking was heard at the door. The king had sent for 
the sergeant to bring away the mace. The House would not yet 
part with the symbol of authority; but after some delay, the 
sergeant was allowed to go. Hobart let him out, and locked the 
door after him again. 

As soon as order was restored, there was a fresh discussion on 
the propriety of naming the lord treasurer. Sir Peter Heyman 
turned once more upon Finch: "I am sorry," he said, "that you 
must be made an instrument to cut up the liberties of the subject 
by the roots. I am sorry you are a Kentish man, and that you 
are of that name which hath borne some good reputation in our 



The Parliamentary Crisis of 1629 353 

country. The speaker of the House of Commons is our mouth, 
and if our mouth will be sullen and will not speak when we would 
have it, it should be bitten by the teeth, and ought to be made an 
example; and, for my part, I think it not fit you should escape 
without some mark of punishment to be set upon you by the 
House." 

It was easier to speak of punishment than to inflict it. Max- 
well, the usher of the Black Rod, was now knocking at the door 
with a message from the king. The moments were fast flying, 
and there was no time for longer deliberation. Charles had sent 
for his guard to force a way into the House. Not a minute was 
to be lost in idle recrimination. Holies threw himself into the 
breach. "Since that paper is burnt," he said, "I conceive I 
cannot do his Majesty nor my country better service than to 
deliver to this House what was contained in it, which, as I remem- 
ber, was thus much in effect : — 

"Whosoever shall bring in innovation in religion, or by favor 
seek to extend or introduce popery or Arminianism, or other 
opinions disagreeing from the true and orthodox Church, shall be 
reputed a capital enemy to this kingdom and the commonwealth. 

"Whosoever shall counsel or advise the taking and levying of 
the subsidies of tonnage and poundage, not being granted by Par- 
liament, or shall be an actor or an instrument therein, shall be 
likewise reputed an innovator in the government, and a capital 
enemy to this kingdom and commonwealth. 

"If any merchant or other person whatsoever shall voluntarily 
yield or pay the said subsidies of tonnage and poundage, not being 
granted by Parliament, he shall likewise be reputed a betrayer of 
the liberty of England, and an enemy to the same." 

It was hopeless to apply again to speaker or clerk. Holies put 
the question himself. Hearty shouts of "Ay!" "Ay!" adopted 
the defiance which he flung in the face of the king. The House 
then voted its own adjournment. The door was thrown open at 
last, and the members poured forth to convey to the outer world 
the tidings of their high resolve. Eleven years were to pass away 
before the representatives of the country were permitted to cross 
that threshold again. . . . 

Immediately after the adjournment a proclamation for the 
dissolution of Parliament was drawn up and signed by the king. 
Charles threw the whole blame upon the insolence of those who 
had resisted his command to adjourn. Yet it was not without 
hesitation that the decisive step was taken. Coventry was sup- 

2A 



354 English Historians 

ported by a considerable following in the council in asking that 
a milder course should be adopted. Weston, whose impeach- 
ment had been called for by Eliot, argued strongly on the other 
side. For two days the contending parties strove with one 
another, and it was only on the 4th that the Proclamation was made 
public. The day before, Eliot and eight other members of the 
Commons had been summoned to appear before the board. 
Seven of them presented themselves before the council, and were 
committed either to the Tower or to other prisons. The other 
two were subsequently captured, and shared the fate of their 
friends. 



CHAPTER III 

ARCHBISHOP LAUD AND THE RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY 

During the period of personal government, Charles I did many, 
things which irritated the people of England. He fined men who, 
though holding by military tenure lands worth £40 a year, had not 
been knighted, thus reviving a practice which men believed to be 
obsolete. He levied ship money to build up his navy, and to 
replenish his treasury resorted to many other schemes which 
stirred up a bitter opposition from those on whom the burdens 
fell. To these sources of discontent another was added in the 
appointment of Laud as Archbishop of Canterbury. In his own 
words, Laud "labored nothing more than that the external pub- 
lic worship of God, too much slighted in most parts of the king- 
dom — might be preserved, and that with as much decency and 
uniformity as might be." Here were an ideal and a determination 
clearly athwart the temper of the growing Puritan party. The 
student, therefore, seeking the forces at work in the constitutional 
struggle must closely examine the policy and actions of Arch- 
bishop Laud. 

§ 1. The Character 0} Archbishop Laud 1 

Soberness of judgment in matters of doctrine, combined with 
an undue reverence for external forms, an entire want of imagina- 
tive sympathy, and a quick and irritable temper, made Laud one 
of the worst rulers who could at this crisis have been imposed upon 
the English Church. For it was a time when, in the midst of 
diverging tendencies of thought, many things were certain to be 
said and done, which would appear extravagant to his mind ; and 

1 Gardiner, History of England, 160J-1642, Vol. VII, pp. 301 ff. By 
permission of Longmans, Green. & Company, Publishers. 

355 



356 English Historians 

when the bond of unity which he sought to preserve was to be 
found rather in identity of moral aim than in exact conformity 
with any special standard. The remedy for the diseases of the 
time, in short, was to be sought in liberty, and of the value of liberty 
Laud was as ignorant as the narrowest Puritan or the most bigoted 
Roman Catholic' 

Those who are most prone to misunderstand others are them- 
selves most liable to be misunderstood. The foreign ecclesiastic, 
if such he was, who offered Laud a cardinal's hat, did not stand 
alone in his interpretation of the tendencies of the new archbishop. 
One Ludowick Bowyer, a young man of good family, who may 
have been mad, and was certainly a thief and a swindler, went 
about spreading rumors that Laud had been detected in raising 
a revenue for the pope, and had been sent to the Tower as a traitor. 
The Star Chamber imprisoned him for life, fined him £3000, or- 
dered him to be set three times in the pillory, to lose his ears, and 
to be branded on the forehead with the letters L and R, as a liar 
and a rogue. "His censure is upon record," wrote Laud coolly 
in his diary, "and God forgive him. ..." 

The sharpness and irritability with which Laud was commonly 
charged were not inconsistent with a readiness to use persuasion 
rather than force as long as mildness promised a more successful 
issue. When once he discovered that an opponent was not to be 
gained over, he lost all patience with him. He had no sense of 
humor to qualify the harshness of his judgment. Small offences 
assumed in his eyes the character of great crimes. If in the Star 
Chamber, any voice was raised for a penalty out of all proportion 
to the magnitude of the fault, that voice was sure to be the arch- 
bishop's. 

2. Land and Ecclesiastical Discipline 

Almost immediately after his promotion Laud received a letter 
from the king which was doubtless written at his own instigation. 
In this letter he was directed to see that the bishops observed the 
canon which restricted their ordinations to persons who, unless 
they held certain exceptional positions, were able to show that 
they were about to undertake the cure of souls. In this way the 
door of the ministry would be barred against two classes of men 
which were regarded by the archbishop with an evil eye, and at 
which he had already struck in the king's instructions issued four 
years before. No man would now be able to take orders with the 
intention of passing his life as a lecturer, in the hope that he would 



Archbishop Laud and the Religious Controversy 357 

thus escape the obligation of using the whole of the services in the 
Prayer Book. Nor would any man be able to take orders with 
the hope of obtaining a chaplaincy in a private family, where he 
would be bound to no restrictions except those which his patron 
was pleased to lay upon him. Only peers and other persons of 
high rank were now to be permitted to keep chaplains at all. 

Undoubtedly the system thus attacked was an evil system. 
The separation between the lecturer who preached and the con- 
forming minister who read the service was admirably contrived 
to raise feelings of partisanship in a congregation and a division 
amongst the clergy themselves. The lecturer who sat in the vestry 
till the prayers were over, and then mounted the pulpit as a being 
infinitely superior to the mere reader of prayers who had preceded 
him, was not very likely to promote the peace of the Church. The 
system of chaplaincies was fraught with evils of another kind. 
The chaplain of a wealthy patron might indeed be admitted as 
the honored friend of the house, the counsellor in spiritual diffi- 
culties, the guide and companion of the younger members oi* the 
family; but in too many instances the clergyman who accepted 
such a position would sink into the dependent hanger-on of a 
rich master, expected to flatter his virtues and to be very lenient 
to his faults, to do his errands and to be the butt of his jests. 
Promoters of ecclesiastical discipline like Laud, and dramatic 
writers who cared nothing for ecclesiastical discipline at all, were 
of one mind in condemning a system which brought the ministers 
of the gospel into a position in which they might easily be treated 
with less consideration than a groom. . . . 

Laud's intense concentration upon the immediate present 
hindered him from perceiving the ultimate consequence of his 
acts. His strong confidence in the power of external discipline 
to subdue the most reluctant minds encouraged him to seize the 
happy moment when the king, and, as he firmly believed, the law, 
was on his side. Deeper questions about the suitability of that 
law to human nature in general or to English nature in particular 
he passed over as irrelevant. He did not look to the king to carry 
out some ideal which the law knew nothing of. He had "ever 
been of opinion that the king and his people" were "so joined 
together in one civil and politic body, as that it" was "not possible 
for any man to be true to the king that shall be found treacherous 
to the State established by law, and work to the subversion of the 
people." In his eyes, no doubt the king possessed legal powers 
which the mediaeval churchman would have regarded as tyrannical 



358 English Historians 

usurpation. As the king administered justice by his judges, and 
announced his political resolutions by his privy council, so he 
exercised his ecclesiastical authority through his bishops or his 
Court of High Commission. Though the bishops might give him 
advice which he would not find elsewhere, and though they might 
owe their power to act to a special divine appointment,, yet all 
their jurisdiction came from the sovereign, as clearly as the juris- 
diction of the King's Bench and the Exchequer came from him. 
Hence Laud cared as little for the spiritual independence of bishops 
as he cared for the spiritual independence of congregations. His 
counterpart in our own times is to be found, not in the ecclesiastics 
who magnify the authority of the Church, but in the lawyers who, 
substituting the supremacy of the House of Commons for the 
supremacy of the crown, strive in vain to reply to all spiritual and 
moral questionings by the simple recommendation to obey the 
law. 

§ 3. Laud and Ecclesiastical Architecture 

Laud understood far better how to deal with buildings than with 
men. The repairs at St. Paul's were being carried briskly on 
under the superintendence of Inigo Jones. During the remainder 
of Laud's time of power from £9000 to £15,000 a year were de- 
voted to the work, arising partly from contributions more or Jess 
of a voluntary nature, partly from fines imposed by the High Com- 
mission which were set aside for the purpose. Much to the king's 
annoyance, rumors were spread that the greater part of this money 
was not applied to the building at all, but went to swell the failing 
revenues of the crown. The restoration of the external fabric 
drew attention to an abuse of long standing. The nave and aisles 
had, from times beyond the memory of men then living, been 
used as places of public resort. Porters carried their burdens 
across the church as in the open street. Paul's Walk, as the long 
central aisle was called, was the rendezvous of the men of business 
who had a bargain to drive, and of the loungers whose highest 
wish was to while away an idle hour in agreeable society. To the 
men of the reigns of James I and Charles I it was all that the 
coffee-houses became to the men of the reign of Charles II and 
James II, and all that the clubhouses are to the men of the reign 
of Victoria. There were to be heard the latest rumors of the day. 
.There men told how some fresh victory had been achieved by 
Gustavus, or whispered how Laud had sold himself to the pope, 
and how Portland had sold himself to the king of Spain. There, 



Archbishop Laud and the Religious Controversy 359 

too, was to be heard the latest scandal affecting the credit of some 
merchant of repute or the good name of some lady of title. When 
the gay world had moved away, children took the place of their 
elders, making the old arches ring with their merry laughter. 
The clergy within the choir complained that their voices were 
drowned by the uproar, and that neither prayers nor sermon 
reached the ears of the congregation. 

With this misuse of the cathedral church of the capital, Charles, 
not a moment too soon, resolved to interfere. He issued orders 
that no one should walk in the nave in time of service, that bur- 
dens should not be carried in the church at all, and that the 
children must look elsewhere for a playground. In order to meet 
the wants of the loungers excluded from their accustomed resort, 
he devoted £500 a year to the building of a portico at the west 
end for their use. The straight lines of the Grecian architecture 
of the portico contrasted strangely with the Gothic traceries 
above. It reminds us, as we see it in the old prints, of the dead- 
ness of feeling with which even a great artist, such as Inigo Jones, 
regarded the marvels of mediaeval architecture ; it may also bring 
before us the memory of one instance in which Charles thought 
it necessary to conciliate opposition. 

In his care for St. Paul's, Laud was not likely to neglect his own 
chapel at Lambeth. Abbott had left it in much disorder. Frag- 
ments of painted glass were mingled confusedly with white spaces 
in the windows. The painted glass was now restored to the con- 
dition in which it had originally been when placed there by Arch- 
bishop Morton. It contained scenes from the Old and New 
Testament; a representation of the Saviour hanging upon the 
cross — a crucifix as the Puritans termed it — occupying the east 
end. When the windows were completed, the communion table 
was moved to the eastern wall. Toward this the archbishop 
and his chaplains bowed whenever they entered. There does 
not seem to have been any thing gorgeous or pompous in the 
ceremonial observed, which would have distinguished it from 
that which is to be seen in almost every parish church in England 
at the present day. . . . 

§ 4. The Puritan Sabbath 

If Laud was intolerant whenever Church order and discipline 
were concerned, the Puritans whom he combated were no less 
intolerant when they believed that the interests of morality were 



360 English Historians 

concerned. No greater contrast can be drawn than between the 
Puritan Sabbath and the traditional Sunday of the Middle Ages. 
The Puritan, however, was not content with passing the day in 
meditation or self-examination, unless he could compel others to 
abandon not merely riotous and disorderly amusements, but even 
those forms of recreation to which they and their fathers had been 
accustomed from time immemorial. The precepts of the Fourth 
Commandment were, according to his interpretation, of perpetual 
obligation. The Christian Lord's Day was but the Jewish Sab- 
bath, and it was the duty of Christian magistrates to enforce its 
strict observance. The opponents of Puritanism took a precisely 
opposite view. The institution of the Christian Sunday, they 
argued, had been handed down simply by the oldest Church tra- 
dition, and it was therefore for the Church to say in what manner 
it should be observed. Nor could the Church, as a loving mother, 
forget that the mass of her children were hardly worked during 
six days of the week, and that it would be cruelty to deprive them 
of that relaxation which they had hitherto enjoyed. 

The question assumed a practical shape through a dispute which 
had recently arisen in Somerset. It had long been a custom in 
that and in the neighboring counties to hold feasts under the name 
of wakes on the day of the saint to whom the parish church was 
dedicated. In the sixteenth century these wakes were, for the 
most part, transferred to the preceding or the following Sunday. 
Such convivial gatherings always afforded a "temptation to coarse 
and unrefined natures, and the wakes not infrequently ended in 
drunkenness and the indulgence of the lower passions. In the 
days of Queen Elizabeth the judges of assize and the justices of 
the peace had forbidden them as unlawful meetings for tippling. 
In 161 5 two manslaughters having been committed at one of these 
festivals, a more stringent order was issued, in which "the con- 
tinual profanation of God's Sabbath" was for the first time men- 
tioned. In 1627 the judges directed that this order should be 
yearly published by every minister in his parish church, and a 
return made of those who had rendered obedience to this com- 
mand. In 1632 these directions were re-issued by Chief Justice 
Richardson. 

Others besides the Puritans of the county gave their support to 
Richardson. Lord Poulett, who had thrown all his influence on 
the side of the crown in the days of Buckingham, headed a petition 
against the wakes. On the other hand, Sir Robert Phelips, who 
had been drawing nearer to the court ever since the disturbance at 



Archbishop Laud and the Religious Controversy 361 

the end of the last session, complained to Laud, and Laud com- 
plained to the king, of the conduct of the judges. 

Laud was especially indignant at the presumption of the judges 
in directing the clergy to read their orders in church, which he 
regarded as an interference with the jurisdiction of the bishop. 
The king approved of his objection, and sent a message to Richard- 
son requiring him to revoke the order at the next Lent assizes. 
Richardson took no notice of the message. Before the summer 
assizes Charles repeated his directions in person. The judge did 
not any longer venture to refuse obedience, but he took care to 
show that he was acting under compulsion. 

Charles lost patience. Richardson was summoned before a 
committee of the council. Laud rated him soundly for his dis- 
obedience. He left the room with tears in his eyes. " I have been 
almost choked," he said, "with a pair of lawn sleeves." He was 
forbidden ever to ride the western circuit again. 

Laud had already written to Pierce, the new bishop of the 
diocese, requesting him to ask the opinion of some ministers in 
the county. The bishop's report was doubtless too highly col- 
ored. The seventy-two ministers to whom he directed his ques- 
tions were probably not selected at random, and they must have 
known what sort of answer would be acceptable to their ecclesi- 
astical superiors ; still it is difficult to set aside their evidence 
altogether. Friendships, they said, were cemented, and old quar- 
rels made up at these gatherings. The churches were better fre- 
quented than on any other Sunday in the year. "I also find," 
added Pierce, "that the people generally would by no means have 
these feasts taken away ; for when the constables of some parishes 
came from the assizes about two years ago, and told their neigh- 
bors that the judges would put down these feasts, they answered 
that it was very hard if they could not entertain their kindred and 
friends once a year to praise God for his blessings, and to pray for 
the king's Majesty, under whose happy government they enjoyed 
peace and quietness, and they said they would endure the judge's 
penalties rather than they would break off their feast days. It is 
found also true by experience that many suits in law have been 
taken up at these feasts by mediation of friends, which could not 
have been so soon ended in Westminster Hall." 

The bishop then pointed out what he considered to be the real 
motive for the objection taken. The precise sort, he said, dis- 
liked the feasts because they were held upon Sundays, "which 
they never call but Sabbath days, upon which they would have no 



362 English Historians 

manner of recreation." Some of the ministers whom he had con- 
sulted were of the contrary opinion. They thought that "if the 
people should not have their honest and lawful recreations upon 
Sundays after evening prayer, they would go either into tippling- 
houses, and there upon their ale-benches talk of matters of the 
Church or State, or else into conventicles." 

Without waiting for Pierce's reply, Charles ordered the re- 
publication of his father's Declaration of Sports. The late king, he 
said, had "prudently considered that, if these times were taken 
from them, the meaner sort whi(ih labor hard all the week should 
have no recreations at all to refresh their spirits." Once more it 
was announced from the throne that as soon as the Sunday after- 
noon service came to an end, the king's "good people" were not to 
"be disturbed, letted, or discouraged from any lawful recreation, 
such as dancing, either men or women, archery for men, leaping, 
vaulting, or any other such harmless recreation, nor from having 
of May-games, Whit-ales and Morris dances, and the setting up 
of maypoles, and other sports therewith used, so as the same be 
had in due and convenient time without impediment or neglect 
of divine service." 

As yet the only notion of liberty entertained by either of the 
church parties was the removal of restrictions which the opposite 
party considered it all-important to impose. The Puritan ob- 
jected to the compulsory observance of the Laudian ceremonies. 
Laud objected to the compulsory observance of the Puritan 
Sabbath. 

It was necessary that the king's intentions should be as widely 
known as possible. As in the last reign, the readiest way seemed 
to be to order the clergy to read the Declaration from the pulpit. 
Once more the old difficulty occurred. There were many amongst 
the clergy to whom the Declaration was mere profanity, and some 
of these had the courage to act upon their opinions. One London 
clergyman read the Declaration first, and the ten commandments 
afterwards. "Dearly beloved," he then said, "ye have heard the 
commandments of God and man, obey which you please." Others 
preserved an obstinate silence. Many' were suspended or deprived 
for their refusal. It is true that Richardson and the Somerset 
justices had not scrupled to require the clergy to read an announce- 
ment of an opposite character. Laud was nothing loath to follow 
their example. In his eyes a minister was bound, like a constable 
or a justice of the peace, to communicate the intentions of the 
government to the people, whenever he was ordered to do so by 



Archbishop Laud and the Religious Controversy 2^3 

the proper ecclesiastical authorities. If the Church gained in 
organization in Laud's hands, the gain was compensated by the 
loss of much of its spiritual influence. 



Bibliographical Note 

Hutton, William Laud, a sympathetic but valuable work. Hallam, Con- 
stitutional History, Vol. I, chap. viii. Ranke, History of England, Vol. II, 
pp. 31 ff. Waddington, Congregational History. Masson, Life of Milton, 
consult index under titles, "Laud" and "Puritanism." 



CHAPTER IV 

LONG PARLIAMENT AND THE PEACEFUL REVOLUTION 

After eleven years of personal government, Charles I was forced 
by peculiar circumstances to call a Parliament and yield reluctantly 
to its demands for redress of grievances. In his attempt to force 
on the Scotch a religious service very much like that in use in Eng- 
land, he had stirred up a rebellion and in "The Second Bishops' 
War," as it is called, was defeated by the Scotch. In the 
preliminary treaty which closed the struggle Charles stipulated to 
pay ^840 a day until the permanent peace was signed. Unable to 
raise this amount he had recourse again to Parliament, and the 
latter, finding the king in a dilemma, took advantage of the oppor- 
tunity to obtain a redress of grievances. The original issues of 
the Puritan Revolution are to be studied in the work of this Long 
Parliament during the early period of its existence. A brief sum- 
mary of this work is to be found in the preface to Mr. Gardiner's 
admirable collection of documents, from which the account given 
here is taken. 

§ 1. The Triennial Act and Impeachment 0} Strafford 1 

For the first time in the reign of Charles I, a Parliament met with 
an armed force behind it. Though the Scottish army, which con- 
tinued to occupy the northern counties till August, 1641, was not 
directly in its service, it depended for its support upon the money 
voted by the English Parliament, and would consequently have 
placed itself at the disposition of Parliament if Charles had threat- 
ened a dissolution. Charles was therefore no longer in a position 
to refuse his assent to bills of which he disapproved, and the series 

1 Gardiner, Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, pp. xxxi ff. 
By permission of the Delegates of the Clarendon Press, Oxford. 

364 



Long Parliament and the Peaceful Revolution 36$ 

of constitutional acts passed during the first ten months of the 
existence of the Long Parliament (November, 1640-August, 1641), 
bear witness to the direction taken by it in constitutional matters. 
The Triennial Act enacting that Parliament was to meet at least 
once in three years, and appointing a machinery by which it might 
be brought together when that period had elapsed, if the crown 
neglected to summon it, struck at Charles's late system of govern- 
ing without summoning Parliament until it suited him to do so, 
but it did nothing to secure the attention of the king to the wishes 
of the houses. Whilst measures were being prepared to give 
effect to the further changes necessary to diminish the king's 
authority, the attention of the houses and of the country was fully 
occupied by the impeachment, which was ultimately turned into 
the attainder of the Earl of Strafford. 

No great constitutional change can take place without giving 
dire offence to those at whose expense the change is made, and 
Parliament had therefore from the very beginning of its existence 
to take into account the extreme probability that Charles, if he 
should ever regain power, would attempt to set at naught all that 
it might do. Against this they attempted to provide by striking 
at his ministers, especially at Strafford, whom they knew to have 
been, for some time, his chief adviser, and whom they regarded as 
the main supporter of his arbitrary government in the past, and 
also as the man who was likely from his ability and strength of will 
to be most dangerous to them in the future, in the event of an 
attempted reaction. They imagined that if he were condemned 
and executed, no other minister would be found daring enough 
to carry out the orders of a king who was bent upon reducing 
Parliament to subjection. They therefore impeached him as a 
traitor, on the ground that his many arbitrary acts furnished evi- 
dence of a settled purpose to place the king above the law, and that 
such a purpose was tantamount to treason ; because, whilst it was 
apparently directed to strengthening the king, it in reality weak- 
ened him by depriving him of the hearts of his subjects. 

Whether it was justifiable or not to put Strafford to death for 
actions which had never before been held to be treasonable, it is 
certain that the Commons, in imagining that Strafford's death 
would end their troubles, underestimated the gravity of the situa- 
tion. They imagined that the king, in breaking through what 
they called the fundamental laws, had been led astray by wicked 
counsel, and that they might therefore fairly expect that when his 
counsellors were punished or removed, he would readily acquiesce 



366 English Historians 

in changes which would leave him all the legal power necessary 
for the well-being of the State. 

Such a view of the case was, however, far from being accurate. 
As a matter of fact, the constitutional arrangements bequeathed 
by the Tudors to the Stuarts had broken down, and Charles could 
argue that he had but perpetuated the leadership of the Tudors in 
the only way which the ambition of the House of Commons left 
open to him, and that therefore every attempt now made to sub- 
ject him to Parliament was a violation of those constitutional 
rights which he ought to exercise for the good of the nation. It is 
true that an ideally great man might have been enlightened by 
the failure of his projects; but Charles was very far from being 
ideally great, and it was therefore certain that he would regard 
the designs of the Commons as ruinous to the well-being of the 
kingdom as well as to his own authority. The circumstances of 
Strafford's trial increased his irritation, and he had recourse to 
intrigues with the English army which still remained on foot in 
Yorkshire, hoping to engage it in his cause against the pretensions 
of Parliament. Against these intrigues a general protestation was 
directed. It was drawn up by Pym, and was taken by every mem- 
ber of both houses as a token of their determination to resist 
any forcible interference with their proceedings. It was rapidly 
followed by the king's assent, given under stress of mob violence, 
to the act for Strafford's attainder. 

§ 2. The Real Position of King and Parliament 

On the day on which the king's assent to Strafford's death was 
given, he also consented to an act against the dissolution of the 
Long Parliament without its own consent. It was the first act 
which indicated the new issues which had been opened by the 
manifest reluctance of Charles to accept the diminution- of his 
power on which Parliament insisted. Taking into account the 
largeness of the changes proposed, together with the character of 
the king from whom the power was to be abstracted, it is hardly 
possible to avoid the conclusion that nothing short of a change of 
kings would meet the difficulties of the situation. Only a king 
who had never known what it was to exercise the old powers would 
feel himself at his ease under the new restrictions. 

However reasonable such a conclusion may be, it was not only 
impossible, but undesirable, that it should be acted on at once. 
Great as was both physically and morally the injury inflicted on 



Long Parliament and the Peaceful Revolution 367 

the country by the attempt of Parliament to continue working with 
Charles, the nation had more to gain from the effort to preserve 
the continuity of its traditions than it had to lose from the immedi- 
ate evil results of its mistake. If that generation of Englishmen 
was slow to realize the truth in this matter, and suffered great 
calamities in consequence, its very tenacity in holding firm to 
the impossible solution of a compromise with Charles I gave bet- 
ter results even to itself than would have ensued if it had been 
quick to discern the truth. A nation which easily casts itself 
loose from the traditions of the past loses steadiness of purpose, 
and, ultimately wearied by excitement, falls into the arms of 
despotism. 

In spite, therefore, of the appearance of chaos in the history of 
the years 1 640-1 649, the forces which directed events are easily 
to be traced. During the first months of the Long Parliament 
there is the resolution — whilst retaining the kingship — to trans- 
fer the general direction of government from the king to Parlia- 
ment, and more especially to the House of Commons, a resolution 
which at first seems capable of being carried out by the abolition 
of the institutions which had given an exceptional position to the 
Tudor and Stuart sovereigns. ' Later on there is the gradual 
awakening of a part of the nation to the truth that it is impossible 
to carry out the new system in combination with Charles, and this 
leads to the putting forth by Parliament of a claim to sovereignty, 
really incompatible with kingship. Even those, however, who 
are most ready to break with the past, strive hard to maintain 
political continuity by a succession of proposed compromises, 
not one of which is accepted by both parties. 

§ 3. Additional Constitutional Gains by Parliament 

The Tonnage and Poundage Act, which became law on June 22, 
bears the impress of the first of these movements. On the one 
hand, whilst it asserts the illegality of the levy of customs-duties 
without a Parliamentary grant, it gives to Charles not merely the 
Tonnage and Poundage given to his father, but also "such other 
sums of money as have been imposed upon any merchandise 
either outward or inward by pretext of any letters patent, commis- 
sion under the Great Seal of England or Privy Seal, since the first 
year of his late Majesty King James, of blessed memory, and which 
were continued and paid at the beginning of this present Par- 
liament." On the other hand, it shows how greatly Charles 



368 English Historians 

was distrusted by limiting the grant to less than two months, from 
May 25 to July 15. 

The circumstances which caused this distrust are revealed in the 
ten propositions for a political and religious settlement. The 
English army was still under arms in Yorkshire, and though it 
was about to be disbanded, the king proposed to visit Scotland 
with the intention, as was then suspected, and is now known, 
of stirring up the Scots to assist him in England. At such a time 
it may well have seemed unwise to make the king financially 
independent, and subsequent events increasing the feeling, the 
Tonnage and Poundage Act was renewed for short periods only, 
till the outbreak of the Civil War put an end to any wish to supply 
the king. 

In spite of the king's hope of bringing about a reaction with 
Scottish aid, he did not feel himself strong enough to refuse his 
assent to the bills prepared for cutting off the powers acquired by 
the Tudors, and on July 5 he gave his consent to the act for the 
abolition of the Star Chamber and to the act for the abolition of 
the High Commission. The work of branding with illegality the 
extraordinary financial means to which he had himself resorted 
was completed by the act declaring the illegality of ship-money, 
the act for the limitation of forests, and the act prohibiting the 
exaction of knighthood fines. 

Thus far Parliament had been practically unanimous. The 
constitution which had been virtually modified in 1629 to the profit 
of monarchy was legally modified in 1641 to the disadvantage of 
monarchy. If there had been nothing more than constitutional 
questions at issue, it is highly probable that if the king had con- 
tinued to intrigue with the object of redressing forcibly the balance 
in his favor, Parliament, backed by the active part of the nation, 
would have at last been almost unanimous in demanding a change 
of sovereigns. It is however seldom, if it is ever the case, that 
political movements are determined on such simple lines. Human 
action is influenced by many motives, and as the political current 
shifts and varies, ideas which have at one time hardly obtained 
recognition rise to the surface and become all-important in the 
direction of events. 

§ 4. Propositions for Religious Reforms 

At the end of August, 1641, the political changes which had been 
unanimously adopted, and which, with the exception of the clauses 



Long Parliament and the Peaceful Revolution 369 

in the Triennial Act for the automatic assembling of Parliament, 
were permanently accepted in 1660 by the government of the 
restoration, had been accomplished. Room was thereby made 
for the consideration of another class of changes on which con- 
siderable difference of opinion existed. Something must be done 
to settle the Church as well as the State, and excepting so far as 
the abolition of the High Commission was concerned, there was 
no such agreement about ecclesiastical as there had been about 
political reforms. It was indeed generally desired that the Church, 
like the State, should be regulated by Parliamentary law rather 
than by the royal authority ; and that an end must be put to the 
alterations in the conduct of worship, which in Laud's eyes were 
but the restoration of legal order, whilst in the eyes of others they 
were unauthorized innovations. Further than this, agreement 
was not to be had. There were those who wished Episcopacy 
and the Common Prayer Book to be abolished, and there were 
others who wished them to be retained with some restraint of the 
authority of the bishops, and with some more or less slight altera- 
tion of the form of prayer. 

These two tendencies had already made themselves felt : the 
first in the Root and Branch Petition, concerning manifold evils' 
in the Church, presented to the House of Commons on December 11, 
1640, and in the so-called Root and Branch Bill for transferring 
Episcopal jurisdiction to Parliamentary Commissioners, which 
reached the committee stage in the House of Commons ; the second 
in the bill on Church Reform, which was read twice in the House 
of Lords. Neither of these obtained the final sanction even of 
the House in which it had been introduced, and when in the 
beginning of September, when the king was away in Scotland, the 
houses prepared for a short recess, the resolutions of the Com- 
mons on Ecclesiastical Innovations and the publication of an 
order of the Lords on the services of the Church showed that 
there were at least divergent tendencies in the two houses as far 
as church matters were concerned. 

The event which precipitated the division of parties was the 
Ulster Rebellion. The first indication that the majority of the 
Commons felt that, with a war in Ireland in prospect, it was neces- 
sary that harmony should exist between the crown and Parlia- 
ment is to be found in the Instructions to the Commons' Committee 
in Scotland, sent up to the Lords on November 8. The demand 
made in these Instructions was for the appointment of councillors 
and ministers approved by Parliament. To grant such a wish would 

2B 



370 English Historians 

practically annihilate the independent action of the crown, and 
the division of parties on ecclesiastical affairs now gave to the king 
a majority of the Lords and a large minority of the Commons upon 
whom he could rely. All those, in short, who wished to see consider- 
able ecclesiastical changes made in the Puritan direction supported 
the authority of the House of Commons, whilst those who wished 
the changes to be few or none supported the authority of the king. 
When Charles returned to London on November 25 his speech to 
the Recorder showed that he was aware where his real strength 
lay, and his policy was completely in accord with his conscience. 
On December 1 a deputation of the Commons presented to him 
the Grand Remonstrance, which had been carried by a small 
majority before his return. After setting forth at length the 
details of the late misgovernment, the House asked for the employ- 
ment of ministers in whom Parliament might confide, and for the 
reference of church reform to a synod of divines whose conclusions 
might be confirmed by Parliament. As there was to be no tolera- 
tion of Non-conformity, the plan of the framers of the Grand Re- 
monstrance was to substitute the general enforcement of their own 
form of church government and worship for that which had re- 
cently been enforced by the authority of the king and the bishops. 
On December 10 Charles answered indirectly by a Proclamation 
on Religion, and directly on December 23 by his answer to the 
petition accompanying the Grand Remonstrance. The general 
outcome of the discussion was that the House of Commons wanted 
their will to prevail in all that was to be done, whilst the king was 
ready to hear what they had to say and to assent to just as much 
as he pleased. If only an appeal to force could be averted, the 
majority of the Commons had the game in their own hands. They 
had but to refuse to continue the grant of Tonnage and Poundage 
to reduce Charles to bankruptcy. It was the consciousness that 
this was the case which filled the air with rumors of Royalist plots 
during the last fortnight of December, and which brought a mob 
of apprentices to support the Commons in Palace Yard, and a 
crowd of officers who had served in the now disbanded army of 
the north to support the king at Whitehall. 

Such a tension of feeling could not last long, and the king was 
the first to move. On January 3, 1642, his attorney-general im- 
peached five leading members of the House of Commons, and 
one member of the House of Lords. On January 4 the king came 
in person to the House of Commons to seize the five members. 
The five took refuge in the city, which rose in their defence, and 



Long Parliament and the Peaceful Revolution 371 

Charles, finding the forces of the city arrayed against him, left 
Westminster on January 10. On January 17 the Commons set 
forth a declaration telling the story from their point of view, and 
defending their own constitutional position. 

§ 5. The Militia Ordinance and Breach between King and 

Parliament 

Though the king absented himself from Westminster, negotia- 
tions between him and the Parliament still continued. On Feb- 
ruary 13 he gave his consent to the last two acts which became 
law in his reign. The first was the Clerical Disabilities Act, by 
which the clergy were disabled from exercising temporal juris- 
diction and the bishops were deprived of their votes in the House 
of Lords ; the other the Impressment Act, authorizing the impress- 
ment of soldiers for the service of Ireland. The fact that an 
army was being brought into existence for Ireland constituted a 
danger for whichever of the two parties failed to hold military 
command, and this last act was soon followed by a claim put for- 
ward by Parliament to appoint the lords lieutenant of the 
counties, who were at the head of the militia or civilian army 
which .was, in time of peace, the only force at the disposal of the 
king. As Charles, naturally enough, refused to give such power 
into the hands of those whom he regarded as his enemies, the 
houses, on March 5, passed a militia ordinance to the effect 
which they desired. An ordinance was nothing more than a bill 
which had been accepted by the two houses, but had not received 
the royal assent, and for some months the houses had claimed 
the right of acting on such ordinances as if they had the force of 
law. 

For the next few months a long and wordy controversy on the 
legality of this step arose. In the Nineteen Propositions' are set 
forth as a whole the constitutional changes demanded by the 
prevailing party at Westminster. They would simply have es- 
tablished government by persons appointed by Parliament in lieu 
of government by the king, and they may therefore be taken as 
definitely marking the acceptance by the majority of the House 
of Commons of the idea that the king's sovereignty must not 
merely be weakened, but practically set aside. Against this pro- 
posed system were enlisted not only the feelings of Charles, but 
also those of every man who disliked the ecclesiastical or civil 
policy of the houses. In other words, a question arose whether 



372 English Historians 

the unlimited power of the houses would not be as despotically 
vexatious as had been the unlimited power of the king, and the 
solution of diminishing the sphere of government by enlarging 
the sphere of individual right did not as yet occur to either party. 
Civil war was the natural result of such a condition of things. 
On June 12 Charles issued Commissions of Array to summon 
the militia of the counties to his side, and on July 12 the houses 
resolved, in addition to their claim to command the militia, to 
raise an army and place it under the command of the Earl of 
Essex. On August 22 the king raised his standard at Notting- 
ham, and the Civil War began which was to decide, at least for 
a time, in whose hands was sovereignty in England. 

Bibliographical Note 

» 

Gardiner, History of England, 1603-1642, Vol. IX, consult table of con- 
tents for topics mentioned in the above extract. Gardiner, Constitutional 
Documents of the Puritan Revolution, for the important documents. Ranke, 
History of England, Vol. II, pp. 215 ff. Hallam, Constitutional History, 
Vol. I, chaps, viii-ix. 



CHAPTER V 

CHARLES I AND HIS ACCUSERS 

After their triumph in the Civil War, the determined opponents 
of the king, especially in the revolutionary army, confronted a very 
difficult situation. Believing from their past experience that the 
king would not keep faith, they expelled his sympathizers from 
the House of Commons. The remnant of the House then com- 
posed of the army party erected a high court which condemned 
the king to death, after a semblance of a trial. The events which 
followed the passage of the sentence are fully narrated by Mr. 
Gardiner, who then closes the account of this great crisis with one 
of the most remarkable historical judgments ever rendered. 

§ i . Signing the Death Warrant l 

The protests against any attempt to act on the sentence of death 
against the king were many and loud. The members of the 
Assembly of Divines joined in supplicating for the king's life, 
and on the same day two Dutch ambassadors, who had been 
specially despatched from the Netherlands for the purpose, made 
a similar request to the House of Commons. It was also reported 
that Fairfax' had urged the Council of Officers in the same direc- 
tion, whilst it was no secret that the Prince of Wales had sent a 
blank sheet of paper, signed and sealed by himself, on which the 
Parliament might inscribe any terms they pleased. That the 
vast majority of the English people would have accepted this offer 
gladly was beyond all reasonable doubt. 

It was but a small knot of men — a bare majority, if they were 
even that, amongst the sitting members of the High Court of 
Justice itself — who had fixedly determined that there should be 

Gardiner, History of the Great Civil War, Vol. IV, pp. 314 ff. By per- 
mission of Longmans, Green, & Company, Publishers. 

373 



374 English Historians 

no relenting; but they had Cromwell amongst them, and Crom- 
well's will, when once his mind had been made up, was abso- 
lutely inflexible. They had, moreover, behind them the greater 
part of the rank and file of the army, to whom the shortest issue 
seemed the best. 

The first difficulty encountered by those who were bent on car- 
rying out the sentence of the court was that of obtaining signatures 
to the death warrant in sufficient numbers to give even an 
appearance of unanimity amongst the judges. On Saturday, 
January 27, 1649, a ^ ew m o re signatures had been added to 
those obtained on the 26th, but on the morning of Monday 
the 29th not only were many still wanting, but there was reason 
to believe that some of the judges who had already signed would 
refuse to repeat their signatures if called on to do so. Yet it was 
impossible to make use of the warrant in its existing condition. 
It had been, as there is little doubt, dated on the 26th, and it 
presupposed a sentence passed on that day, whereas it was notori- 
ous that no sentence had been passed till the 27th. Under these 
circumstances the natural course of proceedings would have been 
to re-copy the warrant with altered dates and to have it signed 
afresh. What was actually done was to erase the existing date, 
and to make such other alterations as were requisite to bring the 
whole document into conformity with actual facts. Of the names 
of the three officers finally charged with the execution of the 
sentence, Hacker, Huncks, and Phayre, that of Huncks alone 
was unaltered. The names over which those of Hacker and Phayre 
were written are now illegible, but they can hardly fail to have 
been those of men who shrank from carrying out the grim duty 
assigned to them. 

Having by this extraordinary means secured the retention of 
the signatures already given, the managers of the business, who- 
ever they were, applied themselves energetically to increase the 
number. The testimony of those regicides who pleaded after the 
Restoration that they had acted under compulsion must, indeed, 
be received with the utmost caution ; but there is no reason to 
doubt that considerable pressure was put upon those judges who 
having agreed to the sentence now showed a disinclination to sign 
the warrant. In all the stories by the regicides on their defence, 
Cromwell takes a prominent place, and it is easy to understand 
how meanly he must have thought of men who, after joining in 
passing the sentence, declined to sign the warrant. When those 
members of the court who were also members of Parliament took 



Charles I and his Accusers 375 

their places in the House, Cromwell is reported to have called on 
them to sign without further delay. "Those that are gone in," 
he said, "shall set their hands. I will have their hands now." 

Later in the day, when the warrant lay for signature on a table 
in the painted chamber, the scene grew animated. It is said that 
Cromwell, whose pent-up feelings sometimes manifested them- 
selves in horse-play, drew an inky pen across Marten's face, and 
that Marten inked Cromwell's face in return. According to 
another story which was for a long time accepted as true, Crom- 
well dragged Ingoldsby to the table, and forced him to sign by 
grasping his hand with a pen in it. The firmness of Ingoldsby's 
signature, however, contradicts the latter part of the assertion, 
though it is possible that some sort of compulsion was previously 
used to bring him to the point. 

On the whole it will be safe to assume that great pressure was 
put, sometimes in rough military fashion, on those who hung 
back. On the other hand, there is no evidence given by any of 
the regicides, when put upon their trial, of any definite threats 
being used against those who made difficulties about signing. 
Downes, indeed, who did not sign at all, described himself as 
having been frightened into assenting to the judgment, but he 
had nothing to say about any ill effects resulting to him on account 
of his refusal to sign. 

In one way or another fifty-nine signatures were at last obtained. 
Nine out of these sixty-seven who had given sentence did not sign ; 
but, on the other hand, Ingoldsby, who signed the warrant, had 
been absent when the sentence was passed. . . . 

§ 2. Mr. Gardiner's Judgment of the Puritan Revolution 

Those who brought Charles to the scaffold strengthened the 
revulsion of feeling in his favor which had begun to set in ever 
since it had been clearly brought home to the nation that its 
choice lay between the rule of the king and the rule of the sword. 
It is indeed true that the feeling hostile to the army was not created 
by the execution of Charles, but its intensity was greatly strength- 
ened by the horror caused by the spectacle of sufferings so meekly 
endured. 

Charles's own patience, and the gentleness with which he met 
harshness and insult, together with his own personal dignity, won 
hearts which might otherwise have been steeled against his pre- 
tensions. The often-quoted lines of Andrew Marvell set forth 



376 English Historians 

the impression which Charles's bearing on the scaffold produced 
on even hostile spectators : — 

He nothing common did or mean 
Upon that memorable scene, 

But with his keener eye 

The axe's edge did try; 
Nor called the gods, with vulgar spite, 
To vindicate his helpless right; 

But bowed his comely head 

Down, as upon a bed. 

Marvell's verses embodied his own recollections of the external 
dignity of the man. A little book, which under the title of Eikon 
Basilike was issued with calculated timeliness to the world on 
February 9, the day after the king's funeral, purported to be the 
product of Charles's own pen, and aimed at being a spiritual 
revelation of the inmost thoughts of the justest of sovereigns 
and the most self-denying of martyrs. Its real author, Dr. John 
Gauden, a nominally Presbyterian divine, caught with great felicity 
the higher motives which were never absent from Charles's mind, 
and gave to the narratives and meditations of which the book con- 
sisted enough of dramatic veracity to convince all who were pre- 
pared to believe it that they had before them the real thoughts of 
the man who had died because he refused to sacrifice law and 
religion to an intriguing Parliament and a ruffianly army. The 
demand for the book was well-nigh unlimited. Edition after 
edition was exhausted almost as soon as it left the press. The 
greedily devoured volumes served to create an ideal image of 
Charles which went far to make the permanent overthrow of the 
monarchy impossible. 

The ideal thus created had the stronger hold on men's minds 
because it faithfully produced at least one side of Charles's char- 
acter. The other side — his persistent determination to ignore 
all opinions divergent from his own, and to treat all by whom 
they were entertained as knaves or fools — had been abundantly 
illustrated in the course of the various negotiations which had 
been carried on from time to time in the course of the Civil War. 
It finally led to a struggle for the possession of that Negative 
Voice which, if only the king could succeed in retaining it, would 
enable him to frustrate all new legislation even when supported 
by a determined national resolve. On the one side were undoubt- 
edly both law and tradition; on the other side the necessity of 



Charles I and his Accusers 377 

shaping legislation by the wishes of the nation, and not by the 
wishes of any single man or of a single class. 

Fortunately or unfortunately, such abstract considerations sel- 
dom admit of direct application to politics. It is at all times 
hard to discover what the wishes of a nation really are, and least 
of all can this be done amidst the fears and passions of a revolu- 
tionary struggle. Only after long years does a nation make clear 
its definite resolve, and for this reason wise statesmen — whether 
monarchical or republican — watch the currents of opinion and 
submit to compromises which will enable the national sentiment 
to make its way without a succession of violent shocks. Charles's 
fault lay not so much in his claim to retain the Negative Voice as 
in his absolute disregard of the conditions of the time, and of the 
feelings and opinions of every class of his subjects with which 
he happened to disagree. Even if those who opposed Charles 
in the later stages of his career failed to rally the majority of the 
people to their side, they were undoubtedly acting in accordance 
with a permanent national demand for that government of com- 
promise which slowly but irresistibly developed itself in the course 
of the century. 

Nor can it be doubted that if Charles had, under any con- 
ditions, been permitted to re-seat himself on the throne, he would 
quickly have provoked a new resistance. As long as he remained 
a factor in English politics, government by compromise was im- 
possible. His own conception of government was that of a wise 
prince constantly interfering to check the madness of the people. 
In the Isle of Wight he wrote down with approval the lines in which 
Claudian, the servile poet of the court of Honorius, declared it to 
be an error to give the name of slavery to the service of the best of 
princes, and asserted that liberty never had a greater charm than 
under a pious king. Even on the scaffold he reminded his sub- 
jects that a share in the government was nothing appertaining to 
the people. It was the tragedy of Charles's life that he was en- 
tirely unable to satisfy the cravings of those who inarticulately 
hoped for the establishment of a monarchy which, while it kept 
up the old traditions of the country, and thus saved England 
from a blind plunge into an unknown future, would yet allow the 
people of the country to be to some extent masters of their own 
destiny. 

Yet if Charles persistently alienated this large and important 
section of his subjects, so also did his most determined opponents. 
The very merits of the Independents — their love of toleration 



378 English Historians 

and of legal and political reform, together with their advocacy of 
democratic change — raised opposition in a nation which v/as pre- 
pared for none of these things, and drove them step by step to rely 
on armed strength rather than upon the free play of constitutional 
action. But for this it is probable that the Vote of No Addresses 
would have received a practically unanimous support in the Parlia- 
ment and the nation, and that in the beginning of 1648 Charles 
would have been dethroned and a new government of some kind 
or other established with good hope of success. As it was, in 
their despair of constitutional support, the Independents were led 
in spite of their better feelings to the employment of the army as 
an instrument of government. 

The situation, complicated enough already, had been still 
further complicated by Charles's duplicity. Men who would 
have been willing to come to terms with him despaired of any 
constifutional arrangement in which he was to be a factor, and 
men who had long been alienated from him were irritated into 
active hostility. By these he was regarded with increasing in- 
tensity as the one disturbing force with which no understanding 
was possible and no settled order consistent. To remove him out 
of the way appeared, even to those who had no thought of punish- 
ing him for past offences, to be the only possible road to peace 
for the troubled nation. It seemed that so long as Charles 
lived, deluded nations and deluded parties would be stirred up 
by promises never intended to be fulfilled, to fling themselves, 
as they had flung themselves in the second Civil War, against 
the new order of things which was struggling to establish itself 
in England. 

Of this latter class Cromwell made himself the mouthpiece. 
Himself a man of compromises, he had been thrust, sorely against 
his will, into direct antagonism with the uncompromising king. 
He had striven long to mediate between the old order and the 
new, first by restoring Charles as a constitutional king, and after- 
wards by substituting one of his children for him. Failing in this, 
and angered by the persistence with which Charles stirred up 
Scottish armies and Irish armies against England, Cromwell 
finally associated himself with those who cried out most loudly for 
the king's blood. No one knew better than Cromwell that it was 
folly to cover the execution of the king with the semblance of 
constitutional propriety, and he may well have thought that, though 
law and constitution had both broken down, the first step to be 
taken towards their reconstruction was the infliction of the penalty 



Charles I and his Accusers 379 

of death upon the man who had shown himself so wanting in that 
elemental quality of veracity upon which laws and constitutions 
are built up. All that is known of Cromwell's conduct at the 
trial — his anger with Downes's scruples and the pressure which 
he put upon those who were unwilling to sign the death-warrant — 
point to his contempt for the legal forms with which others were 
attempting to cover an action essentially illegal. 

Tradition has handed down an anecdote which points to the 
same explanation of the workings of Cromwell's mind. "The 
night after King Charles was beheaded," it is said, "my Lord 
Southampton and a friend of his got leave to sit up by the body 
in the banqueting house at Whitehall. As they were sitting very 
melancholy there, about two o'clock in the morning they heard the 
tread of somebody coming very slowly upstairs. By and by the 
door opened, and a man entered very much muffled up in his 
cloak, and his face quite hid in it. He approached the body, con- 
sidered it very attentively for some time, and then shook his head, 
sighed out the words, ' Cruel necessity ! ' He then departed in 
the same slow and concealed manner as he had come. Lord 
Southampton used to say that he could not distinguish anything 
of his face ; but that by his voice and gait he took him to be Oliver 
Cromwell." 

Whether the necessity really existed or was but the tyrant's 
plea is a question upon the answer to which men have long dif- 
fered, and will probably continue to differ. All can perceive that 
with Charles's death the main obstacle to the establishment of 
a constitutional system was removed. Personal rulers might 
indeed reappear, and Parliament had not yet so displayed its 
superiority as a governing power to make Englishmen anxious to 
dispense with monarchy in some form or other. The monarchy, 
as Charles understood it, had disappeared forever. Insecurity of 
tenure would make it impossible for future rulers long to set pub- 
lic opinion at naught, as Charles had done. The scaffold at White- 
hall accomplished that which neither the eloquence of Eliot and 
Pym nor the statutes and ordinances of the Long Parliament had 
been capable of effecting. 

So far the work of Cromwell and his associates had been purely 
negative. They had overthrown everything ; they had constituted 
nothing. They fondly hoped that when the obstacle to peace had 
been removed, they would be able securely to walk in the ways 
of peace. It was not so to be. The sword destroys but it can do 
no more, and it would be left for others than the stern warriors 



380 English Historians 

who guarded the scaffold of the king to build up slowly and pain- 
fully that edifice of constitutional compromise for which Crom- 
well had cleared the ground. 



Bibliographical Note 

Compare the judgment given above by Gardiner with those rendered 
by Morley, Firth, and Harrison in their lives of Cromwell. Hallam, Con- 
stitutional History, Part I, chap. x. Ranke, History of England, Vol. II, 
chap. vi. 



CHAPTER VI 

CROMWELL AND PARLIAMENT 

The Puritans found opposition and fighting a great deal easier 
than governing a country which was royalist at heart. They did 
not dare to call a freely elected Parliament and let the nation 
decide on the form of government to be adopted. The remnant 
of the Long Parliament which continued to sit after the execution 
of the king was divided into factions, and many of the members 
were corruptly seeking their own advancement. When Crom- 
well urged this Parliament to dissolve itself, it proposed that the 
members then sitting should be continued in the new Parliament 
without election and should exercise the right to exclude new mem- 
bers whom they did not approve. This roused the ire of Crom- 
well, and in April, 1653, ne forcibly dissolved the assembly but 
refused to call an elected Parliament which he had been urging. 

§ 1. The Issues between the Army and Parliament l 

The military revolution of 1653 is the next tall landmark after 
the execution of the king. It is almost a commonplace that "we 
do not know what party means if we suppose that its leader is its 
master, " and the real extent of Cromwell's power over the army 
is hard to measure. In the spring of 1647, when the first violent 
breach between army and Parliament took place, the extremists 
swept him off his feet. Then he acquiesced in Pride's Purge, but 
he did not originate it. In the action that preceded the trial and 
despatching of the king it seems to have been Harrison who took 
the leading part. In 1653 Cromwell said, " Major-General Har- 
rison is an honest man, and aims at good things; yet from the 
impatience of his spirit, he will not wait the Lord's leisure, but 

1 Morley, Cromwell, pp. 329 ff. By permission of The Century Com- 
pany, Publishers. 

381 



382 English Historians 

hurries one into that which he and all honest men will have cause 
to repent." If we remember how hard it is to fathom decisive 
passages in the history of our own time, we see how much of that 
which we would most gladly know in the distant past must ever 
remain a surmise. But the best opinion in respect of the revolution 
of April, 1653, seems to be that the Royalists were not wrong who 
wrote that Cromwell's authority in the army depended much on 
Harrison and Lambert and their fanatical factions; that he was 
forced to go with them in order to save himself; and that he was 
the member of the triumvirate who was most anxious to wait the 
Lord's leisure yet a while longer. 

The immediate plea for the act of violence that now followed is 
as obscure as any other of Cromwell's proceedings. In the closing 
months of 1652 he once more procured occasions of conference 
between himself and his officers on the one hand, and members of 
Parliament on the other. He besought the Parliament men by 
their own means to bring forth of their own accord the good things 
that had been promised and were so long expected — "so tender 
were we to preserve them in the reputation of the people." The 
list of "good things" demanded by the army in the autumn of 
1652 hardly supports the modern exaltation of the army as the 
seat of political sagacity. The payment of arrears, the suppres- 
sion of vagabonds, the provision of work for the poor, were objects 
easy to ask, but impossible to achieve. The request for a new 
election was the least sensible of all. 

When it was known that the army was again waiting on God and 
confessing its sinfulness, things were felt to look grave. Seeing the 
agitation, the Parliament applied themselves in earnest to frame a 
scheme for a new representative body. The army believed that 
the scheme was a sham, and that the semblance of giving the 
people a real right of choice was only to fill up vacant seats by 
such persons as the House now in possession should approve. 
This was nothing less than to perpetuate themselves indefinitely. 
Cromwell and the officers had a scheme of their own: that the 
Parliament should name a certain number of men of the right sort, 
and these nominees should build a constitution. The Parliament, 
in other words, was to abdicate after calling a constituent con- 
vention. On April 19 a meeting took place in Oliver's apartment 
at Whitehall with a score of the more important members of 
Parliament. There the plan of the officers and the rival plan of 
Vane and his friends were brought face to face. What the exact 
scheme of the Parliament was, we cannot accurately tell, and we 



Cromwell and Parliament 383 

are never likely to know. Cromwell's own descriptions of it are 
vague and unintelligible. The bill itself he carried away with 
him under his cloak when the evil day came, and no copy of it 
survived. It appears, however, that in Vane's belief the best 
device for a provisional government — and no other than a pro- 
visional government was then possible — was that the remnant 
should continue to sit, the men who fought deadly battles at West- 
minster in 1647 an d 1648, the men who had founded the Common- 
wealth in 1649, the men who had carried on its work with extraor- 
dinary energy and success for four years and more. These were 
to continue to sit as a nucleus for a full representative, joining to 
themselves such new men from the constituencies as they thought 
not likely to betray the cause. On the whole we may believe that 
this was perhaps the least unpromising way out of difficulties where 
nothing was very promising. It was to avoid the most fatal of all 
the errors of the French Constituent, which excluded all its mem- 
bers from office and from seats in the Legislative Assembly to 
whose inexperienced hands it was intrusting the government of 
France. To blame its authors for fettering the popular choice was 
absurd in Cromwell, whose own proposal instead of a legislature 
to be partially and periodically renewed (if that was really what 
Vane meant) was now for a nominated council without any ele- 
ment of popular choice at all. The army, we should not forget, 
were even less prepared than the Parliament for anything like a 
free and open general election. Both alike intended to reserve 
Parliamentary representation exclusively to such as were godly 
men and faithful to the interests of the Commonwealth. An open 
general election would have been as hazardous and probably as 
disastrous now as at any moment since the defeat of King Charles 
in the field, and a real appeal to the country would only have 
meant ruin to the good cause. Neither Cromwell, nor Lambert, 
nor Harrison, nor any of them, dreamed that a Parliament to be 
chosen without restrictions would be a safe experiment. The only 
questions were : what the restrictions were to be, who was to im- 
pose them, who was to guard and supervise them. The Parlia- 
mentary Remnant regarded themselves as the fittest custodians, and 
it is hard to say that they were wrong. In judging these events of 
1653 we must look forward to events three years later. Cromwell 
had a Parliament of his own in 1654; it consisted of four hundred 
and sixty members; almost his first step was to prevent more than 
a hundred of them from taking their seats. He may have been 
right; but why was the Parliament wrong for acting on the same 



384 English Historians 

principle? He had another Parliament in 1656, and again he 
began by shutting out nearly a hundred of its elected members. 
When the army cried for a dissolution, they had no ideas as to the 
Parliament that was to follow. At least this much is certain : that 
whatever failure might have overtaken the plan of Vane and the 
Parliament, it could not have been more complete than the failure 
that overtook the plan of Cromwell. 

Apart from the question of the constitution of Parliament, and 
perhaps regarding that as secondary, Cromwell quarrelled with 
what, rightly or wrongly, he describes as the ultimate ideal of 
Vane and his friends. We should have had fine work, he said 
four years later — a council of State and a Parliament of four 
hundred men executing arbitrary government, and continuing the 
existing usurpation of the duties of the law courts by legislature 
and executive. Undoubtedly "a horrid degree of arbitrariness" 
was practised by the Rump, but some allowance was to be made 
for a government in revolution; and if that plea be not good for 
the Parliament, one knows not why it should be good for the no 
less " horrid arbitrariness" of the Protector. As for the general 
character of the constitution here said to be contemplated by the 
Remnant, it has been compared to the French convention of 1793 ; 
but a less odious and a truer parallel would be with the Swiss 
Confederacy to-day. However this may be, if dictatorship was 
indispensable, the dictatorship of an energetic Parliamentary oli- 
garchy was at least as hopeful as that of an oligarchy of soldiers. 
When the soldiers had tried their hands and failed, it was to some 
such plan as this that, after years of turmoil and vicissitude, 
Milton turned. At worst it was no plan that either required or 
justified violent deposition by a file of troopers. 

§ 2. Forcible Dissolution of Parliament 

The conference in Cromwell's apartments at Whitehall on 
April 10 was instantly followed by one of those violent outrages 
for which we have to find a name in the dialect of continental 
revolution. It had been agreed that discussion should be resumed 
the next day, and meanwhile that nothing should be done with 
the bill in Parliament. When the next morning came, news was 
brought to Whitehall that the members had already assembled, 
were pushing the bill through at full speed, and that it was on the 
point of becoming law forthwith. At first Cromwell and the 
officers could not believe that Vane and his friends were capable 



Cromwell and Parliament 385 

of such a breach of their word. Soon there came a second mes- 
senger and a third, with assurance that the tidings were true, and 
that not a moment was to be lost if the bill was to be prevented 
from passing. It is perfectly possible that there was no breach 
of word at all. The Parliamentary probabilities are that the 
news of the conference excited the jealousy of the private members, 
as arrangements between front benches are at all times apt to do; 
that they took the business into their own hands, and that the 
leaders were powerless. In astonishment and anger, Cromwell, in 
no more ceremonial apparel than his plain black clothes and gray 
worsted stockings, hastened to the House of Commons. He 
ordered a guard of soldiers to go with him. That he rose that 
morning with the intention of following the counsels that the im- 
patience of the army had long prompted, and finally completing 
the series of exclusions, mutilations, and purges by breaking up 
the Parliament altogether, there is no reason to believe. Long 
premeditation was never Cromwell's way. He waited for the 
indwelling voice, and more than once, in the rough tempests of 
his life, that demoniac voice was a blast of coarse and uncontrolled 
fury. Hence came one of the most memorable scenes of English 
history. There is a certain discord as to details among. our too 
scanty authorities, some even describing the fatal transaction as 
passing with much modesty and as little noise as can be imagined. 
The description derived by Ludlow who was not present, from 
Harrison who was, gathers up all that seems material. There 
appear to have been between fifty and sixty members present. 

" Cromwell sat down and heard the debate for some time. Then 
calling to Major- General Harrison, who was on the other side of 
the House, to come to him, he told him that he judged the Parlia- 
ment ripe for a dissolution and this to be the time for doing it. 
The major-general answered, as he since told me, ' Sir, the work 
is very great and dangerous: therefore I desire you seriously to 
consider of it before you engage in it.' 'You say well,' replied 
the general, and thereupon sat still for about a quarter of an hour. 
Then, the question for passing the bill being to be put, he said 
to Major-General Harrison, 'This is the time: I must do it,' 
and suddenly standing up made a speech, wherein he loaded the 
Parliament with the vilest reproaches, charging them not to have 
a heart to do anything for the public good, to have espoused the 
corrupt interest of presbytery and the lawyers, who were the sup- 
porters of tyranny and oppression, accusing them of an intention 
to perpetuate themselves in power; they had not been forced to 

2C 



3$6 English Historians 

the passing of this act, which he affirmed they designed never to 
observe, and thereupon told them that the Lord had done with 
them and had chosen other instruments for the carrying on His 
work that were more worthy. This he spoke with so much passion 
and discomposure of mind as if he had been distracted. Sir 
Peter Wentworth stood up to answer him, and said that this was 
the first time that he had ever heard such unbecoming language 
given to the Parliament, and that it was the more horrid in that it 
came from their servant, and their servant whom they had so 
highly trusted and obliged. But, as he was going on, the general 
stepped into the midst of the House, where, continuing his dis- 
tracted language, he said, 'Come, come: I will put an end to 
your prating.' Then, walking up and down the House like a 
madman, and kicking the ground with his feet, he cried out, ' You 
are no Parliament; I say you are no Parliament; I will put an 
end to your sitting; call them in, call them in.' Whereupon the 
sergeant attending the Parliament opened the doors; and Lieu- 
tenant-Colonel Wolseley, with two files of musketeers, entered the 
House, which Sir Henry Vane observing from his place said 
aloud, 'This is not honest; yea, it is against morality and com- 
mon honesty.' Then Cromwell fell a-railing at him, crying out 
with a loud voice, ' Oh, Sir Henry Vane, Sir Henry Vane, the 
Lord deliver me from Sir Henry Vane ! ' Then, looking to one 
of the members, he said: 'There sits a drunkard' . . . and, 
giving much reviling language to others, he commanded the mace 
to be taken away, saying, 'What shall we do with this bauble? 
There, take it away.' He having brought all into this disorder, 
Major- General Harrison went to the speaker as he sat in the chair, 
and told him that, seeing things were reduced to this pass, it would 
not be convenient for him to remain there. The speaker answered 
that he would not come down unless he were forced. 'Sir/ said 
Harrison, 'I will lend you my hand'; and thereupon, putting his 
hand within his, the speaker came down. Then Cromwell ap- 
plied himself to the members of the House . . . and said to them, 
'It is you that have forced me to do this, for I have sought the 
Lord night and day that He would rather slay me than put me 
on the doing of this work ! ' (Then) Cromwell . . . ordered the 
House to be cleared of all the members . . . after which he went 
to the clerk, and snatching the Act of Dissolution, which was 
ready to pass, out of his hand, he put.it under his cloak, and, 
having commanded the doors to be locked up, went away to 
Whitehall." 



Cromwell and Parliament 387 



§ 3- Significance oj the Dissolution of Parliament 

The fierce -work was consummated in the afternoon. Crom- 
well heard that the Council of State, the creation of the destroyed 
legislature, was sitting as usual. Thither he repaired with Lam- 
bert and Harrison by his side. He seems to have recovered com- 
posure. "If you are met here as private persons," Cromwell said, 
"you shall not be disturbed; but if as a Council of State, this is 
no place for you ; and since you cannot but know what was done 
at the House this morning, so take notice that the Parliament is 
dissolved." Bradshaw, who was in the chair, was not cowed. 
He had not quailed before a more dread scene with Charles four 
years ago. "Sir," he replied, "we have heard what you did at 
the House this morning, and before many hours all England will 
hear it ; but, sir, you are mistaken to think that the Parliament is 
dissolved ; for no power under heaven can dissolve them but them- 
selves; therefore take you notice of that." 

Whatever else is to be said, it is well to remember that to con- 
demn the Rump is to go a long way towards condemning the revo- 
lution. To justify Cromwell's violence in breaking it up, is to go 
a long way toward justifying Hyde and even Strafford. If the 
Commons had really sunk into the condition described by Oliver 
in his passion, such ignominy showed that the classes represented 
by it were really incompetent, as men like Strafford had always 
deliberately believed, to take that supreme share in governing the 
country for which Pym and his generation of reformers had so 
manfully contended. For the Remnant was the quintessence left 
after a long series of elaborate distillations. They were not 
Presbyterians, moderates, respectables, bourgeois, pedants, Giron- 
dins. They, the great majority of them, were the men who had 
resisted a continuance of the negotiations at Newport. They 
had made themselves accomplices in Pride's Purge. They had 
ordered the trial of the king. They had set up the Commonwealth 
without lords or monarch. They were deep in all the proceed- 
ings of Cromwellian Thorough. They were the very cream after 
purification upon purification. If they could not govern, who 
could ? 

We have seen the harsh complaints of Cromwell against the 
Parliament in 1652: how selfish its members were; how ready to 
break into factions; how slow in business; how scandalous the 
lives of some of them. Yet this seems little better than the im- 



388 English Historians 

patient indictment of the soldier, if we remember how only a few 
months before the French agent had told Mazarin of the new 
rulers of the Commonwealth: "Not only were they powerful by 
sea and land, but they live without ostentation. . . .• They were 
economical in their private expenses, and prodigal in their devotion 
to public affairs, for which each one toils as if for his personal 
interests. They handle large sums of money, which they admin- 
ister honestly." We cannot suppose that two years had trans- 
formed such men into the guilty objects of Cromwell's censorious 
attack. Cromwell admitted, after he had violently broken them 
up, that there were persons of honor and integrity among them 
who had eminently appeared for God and for the public good 
both before and throughout the war. It would in truth have been 
ludicrous to say otherwise of a body that contained patriots so 
unblemished in fidelity, energy, and capacity as Vane, Scot, Brad- 
shaw, and others. Nor is there any good reason to believe that 
these men of honor and integrity were a hopeless minority. We 
need not indeed suppose that -the Rump was without time-servers. 
Perhaps no deliberate assembly in the world ever is without them, 
for time-serving has its roots in human nature. The question is 
what proportion the time-servers bore to the whole. There is no 
sign that it was large. But whether large or small, to deal with 
time-servers is part, and no inconsiderable part, of the statesman's 
business, and it is hard to see how with this poor breed Oliver 
could have dealt worse. 

Again, in breaking up Parliament he committed what in modern 
politics is counted the inexpiable sin of breaking up his party. 
This was the gravest of all. This was what made the Revolution 
of 1653 a turning-point. The Presbyterians hated him as the 
greatest of Independents. He had already set a deep gulf between 
himself and the Royalists of every shade by killing the king. To 
the enmity of the legitimists of a dynasty was now added the 
enmity of the legitimists of Parliament. By destroying the Par- 
liamentary Remnant he set a new gulf between himself and most 
of the best men on his own side. Where was the policy ? What 
foundations had he left himself to build upon? What was his 
calculation, or had he no calculation, of forces, circumstances, 
individuals, for the step that was to come next ? When he stamped 
in wrath out of the desecrated House, had he ever firmly counted 
the cost ? Or was he in truth as improvident as King Charles had 
been when he, too, marched down the same floor eleven years ago ? 
In one sense his own creed erected improvidence into a principle, 



Cromwell and Parliament 389 

"Own your call," he says to the first of his own Parliaments, "for 
it is marvellous, and it hath been unprojected. It's not long since 
either you or we came to know of it. And indeed this hath been 
the way God dealt with us all along. To keep things from our 
eyes all along, so that we have seen nothing in all His dispensations 
long beforehand." And there is the famous saying of his, that 
"he goes furthest who knows not where he is going," — of which 
Retz said that it showed Cromwell to be a simpleton. We may 
at least admit the peril of a helmsman who does not forecast his 
course. 

It is true that the situation was a revolutionary one, and the 
Remnant was no more a legal Parliament than Cromwell was a 
legal monarch. The constitution had long vanished from the 
stage. From the day in May, 1641, when the king had assented 
to the bill, making a dissolution depend on the will of Parliament, 
down to the days in March, 1649, when the mutilated Commons 
abolished the House of Lords and the office of king, story after 
story of the constitutional fabric had come crashing to the ground. 
The Rump alone was left to stand for the old tradition of Parlia- 
ment and it was still clothed, even in the minds of those who were 
most querulous about its present failure of performance, with a 
host of venerated associations — the same associations that had 
lifted up men's hearts all through the fierce tumults of civil war. 
The rude destruction of the Parliament gave men a shock that 
awakened in some of them angry distrust of Cromwell, in others a 
broad resentment at the overthrow of the noblest of experiments, 
and in the largest class of all, deep misgivings as to the past, silent 
self -questioning whether the whole movement since 1641 had not 
been a grave and terrible mistake. 

Guizot truly says of Cromwell that he was one of the men who 
know that even the best course in political action always has its 
drawbacks, and who accept, without flinching, the difficulties that 
might be laid upon them by their own decisions. This time, how- 
ever, the day was not long in coming when Oliver saw reason to 
look back with regret upon those whom he now handled with such 
impetuous severity. When he quarrelled with the first Parlia- 
ment of his Protectorate, less than two years hence, he used his 
old foes, if foes they were, for a topic of reproach against his new 
ones. "I will say this on behalf of the Long Parliament, that had 
such an expedient as this government (the Instrument) been pro- 
posed to them, and could they have seen the cause of God pro- 
vided for, and been by debates enlightened in the grounds of it ; 



390 English Historians 

whereby the difficulties might have been cleared to them, and the 
reason of the whole enforced, and the circumstances of time and 
persons, with the temper and disposition of the people, and affairs 
both abroad and at home might have been well weighed, I think 
in my conscience — well as they were thought to love their seats — 
they would have proceeded in another manner than you have 
done." To cut off in a fit of passion the chance of such a thing 
was a false step that he was never able to retrieve. 

Bibliographical Note 

Gardiner, History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, especially on 
the coup d'etat of 1653. Hallam, Constitutional History, Pt. 2, chap. x. 
Ranke, History of England, Vol. Ill, pp. 71 ff. Source materials in Gardiner, 
Constitutional Documents oj the Puritan Revolution. 



CHAPTER VII 

THE RESTORATION SETTLEMENT IN STATE AND CHURCH 

All during the Puritan Revolution the majority of English 
people were doubtless loyal to the king, and when Cromwell died 
in 1658, factions broke out in the army, by which alone the Protec- 
torate had been maintained. The people, moreover, were heartily 
tired of an absolutism more expensive and galling than the personal 
government of Charles I. The restoration of the monarchy was 
inevitable. In 1660 a freely elected convention Parliament met, 
and having received fair promises from Charles II in his Declara- 
tion of Breda, it announced that " according to the ancient 
and fundamental laws of this kingdom, the government is and 
ought to be by King, Lords, and Commons." In May, 1660, 
Charles landed in England and was duly invested with royal 
authority. 

§ 1. The Restoration and Problems for Settlement 1 

It is universally acknowledged that no measure was ever more 
national, or has ever produced more testimonies of public approba- 
tion, than the restoration of Charles II. Nor can this be attributed 
to the usual fickleness of the multitude. For the late govern- 
ment, whether under the Parliament or the Protector, had never 
obtained the sanction of popular consent, nor could have subsisted 
for a day without the support of the army. The king's return 
seemed to the people the harbinger of a real liberty, instead of that 
bastard Commonwealth which had insulted them with its name — 
a liberty secure from enormous assessments, which, even when 
lawfully imposed, the English had always paid with reluctance, and 
from the insolent despotism of the soldiery. The young and lively 
looked forward to a release from the rigors of fanaticism, and were 
too ready to exchange that hypocritical austerity of the late times 
for a licentiousness and impiety that became characteristic of the 

1 Hallam, Constitutional History of England, Vol. II, pp. 68 ff. 

391 



392 English Historians 

present. In this tumult of exulting hope and joy there was much 
to excite anxious forebodings in calmer men; and it was by no 
means safe to pronounce that a change so generally demanded, 
and in most respects so expedient, could be effected without very 
serious sacrifices of public and particular interests. 

Four subjects of great importance, and some of them very 
difficult, occupied the convention Parliament from the time of the 
king's return till their dissolution in the following December: a 
general indemnity and legal oblivion of all that had been done amiss 
in the late interruption of government; an adjustment of the 
claims for reparation which the crown, the Church, and private 
loyalists had to prefer; a provision for the king's revenue, con- 
sistent with the abolition of military tenures; and the settlement 
of the Church. These were, in effect, the articles of a sort of treaty 
between the king and the nation, without some legislative pro- 
visions as to which no stable or tranquil course of law could be 
expected. 

§ 2. Punishment of the Revolutionists 

The king in his well-known Declaration from Breda, dated the 
14th of April, had laid down, as it were, certain bases of his 
restoration, as to some points which he knew to excite much ap- 
prehension in England. One of these was a free and general 
pardon to all his subjects, saving only such as should be excepted 
by Parliament. It had always been the king's expectation, or 
at least that of his chancellor, that all who had been immediately 
concerned in his father's death should be delivered up to punish- 
ment; and, in the most unpropitious state of his fortunes, while 
making all professions of pardon and favor to different parties, 
he had constantly excepted the regicides. Monk, however, had 
advised, in his first messages to the king, that none, or at most 
not above four, should be excepted on this account; and the Com- 
mons voted that not more than seven persons should lose the bene- 
fit of the indemnity both as to life and estate. Yet, after having 
named seven of the late king's judges, they proceeded in a few 
days to add several more, who had been concerned in managing his 
trial, or otherwise forward in promoting his death. They went on 
to pitch upon twenty persons, whom, on account of their deep 
concern in the transactions of the last twelve years, they deter- 
mined to affect with penalties not extending to death and to be 
determined by some future act of Parliament. As their passions 
grew warmer, and the wishes of the court became better known, 



Restoration Settlement in State and Church 393 

they came to except from all benefit of the indemnity such of the 
king's judges as had not rendered themselves to justice according 
to the late proclamation. In this state the bill of indemnity and 
oblivion was sent up to the Lords. But in that House the old 
Royalists had a more decisive preponderance than among the 
Commons. They voted to except all who had signed the death- 
warrant against Charles I, or sat when sentence was pronounced, 
and five others by name, — Hacker, Vane, Lambert, Haslerig, and 
Axtell. They struck out, on the other hand, the clause reserving 
Lenthall and the rest of the same class for future penalties. They 
made other alterations in the bill to render it more severe; and 
with these, after a pretty long delay, and a positive message from 
the king, requesting them to hasten their proceedings (an irregu- 
larity to which they took no exception, and which in the eyes of 
the nation was justified by circumstances), they returned the bill 
to the Commons. 

The vindictive spirit displayed by the Upper House was not 
agreeable to the better temper of the Commons, where the Pres- 
byterian or moderate party retained great influence. Though the 
king's judges (such, at least, as had signed the death-warrant) were 
equally guilty, it was consonant to the practice of all humane 
governments to make a selection for capital penalties ; and to put 
forty or fifty persons to death for that offence seemed a very sangui- 
nary course of proceeding, and not likely to promote the concilia- 
tion and oblivion so much cried up. But there was a yet stronger 
objection to this severity. The king had published a proclamation, 
in a few days after his landing, commanding his father's judges 
to render themselves up within fourteen days, on pain of being 
excepted from any pardon or indemnity, either as to their lives or 
estates. Many had voluntarily come in, having put an obvious 
construction on this proclamation. It seems to admit of little 
question that the king's faith was pledged to those persons, and 
that no advantage could be taken of any ambiguity in the procla- 
mation without as real perfidiousness as if the words had been more 
express. They were at least entitled to be set at liberty, and to have 
a reasonable time allowed for making their escape, if it were 
determined to exclude them from the indemnity. The Commons 
were more mindful of the king's honor and their own than his 
nearest advisers. But the violent Royalists were gaining ground 
among them, and it ended in a compromise. They left Hacker and 
Axtell, who had been prominently concerned in the king's death, 
to their fate. They even admitted the exceptions of Vane and 



394 English Historians 

Lambert, contenting themselves with a joint address of both 
houses to the king, that, if they should be attainted, execution as to 
their lives might be remitted. Haslerig was saved on a division 
of one hundred and forty-one to one hundred and sixteen, partly 
through the intercession of Monk, who had pledged his word to 
him. Most of the king's judges were entirely excepted ; but with 
a proviso in favor of such as had surrendered according to the 
proclamation, that the sentence should not be executed without 
a special act of Parliament. Others were reserved for penalties 
not extending to life, to be inflicted by a future act. About twenty 
enumerated persons, as well as those who had pronounced sentence 
of death in any of the late illegal high courts of justice, were ren- 
dered incapable of any civil or military office. Thus after three 
months' delay, which had given room to distrust the boasted 
clemency and forgiveness of the victorious Royalists, the Act of 
Indemnity was finally passed. 

Ten persons suffered death soon afterwards for the murder 
of Charles I, and three more who had been seized in Holland 
after a considerable lapse of time. There can be no reasonable 
ground for censuring either the king or the Parliament for their 
punishment, except that Hugh Peters, though a very odious fanatic, 
was not so directly implicated in the king's death as many who 
escaped, and the execution of Scrope, who had surrendered under 
the proclamation, was an inexcusable breach of faith. But nothing 
can be more sophistical than to pretend that such men as Hollis 
and Annesley, who had been expelled from Parliament by the 
violence of the same faction who put the king to death, were not 
to vote for their punishment, or to sit in judgment on them, because 
they had sided with the Commons in the civil war. It is mentioned 
by many writers, and in the Journals, that when Mr. Lenthall, son 
of the late speaker, in the very first days of the Convention Parlia- 
ment, was led to say that those who had levied war against the king 
were as blamable as those who had cut off his head, he received a 
reprimand from the chair, which the folly and dangerous con- 
sequence of his position well deserved ; for such language though 
it seems to have been used by him in extenuation of the regicides, 
was quite in the tone of the violent Royalists. 

§ 3. Adjustment 0} the Land Claims 

A question apparently far more difficult was that of restitution 
and redress. The crown lands, those of the Church, the estates 



Restoration Settlement in State and Church 395 

in certain instances of eminent Royalists had been sold by the 
authority of the late usurpers, and that not at very low rates, con- 
sidering the precariousness of the title. This naturally seemed a 
material obstacle to the restoration of ancient rights, especially in 
the case of ecclesiastical corporations, whom men are commonly 
less disposed to favor than private persons. The clergy them- 
selves had never expected that their estates would revert to them in 
full propriety, and would probably have been contented, at the 
moment of the king's return, to grant easy leases to the purchasers. 
Nor were the House of Commons, many of whom were interested 
in these sales, inclined to let in the former owners without condi- 
tions. A bill was accordingly brought into the House at the begin- 
ning of the session to confirm sales, or give indemnity to the 
purchasers. I do not find its provisions more particularly stated. 
The zeal of the Royalists soon caused the crown lands to be ex- 
cepted. But the House adhered to the principle of composition 
as to ecclesiastical property, and kept the bill a long time in debate. 

At the adjournment in September the chancellor told them his 
Majesty had thought much upon the business, and done much for 
the accommodation of many particular persons, and doubted not but 
that, before they met again, a good progress would be made, so that 
the persons concerned would be much to blame if they received 
not full satisfaction, promising also to advise with some of the Com- 
mons as to that settlement. These expressions indicate a design 
to take the matter out of the hands of Parliament. For it was 
Hyde's firm resolution to replace the Church in the whole of its 
property, without any other regard to the actual possessors than 
the right owners should severally think it equitable to display. 
And this, as may be supposed, proved very small. No further 
steps were taken on the meeting of Parliament after the adjourn- 
ment, and by the dissolution the parties were left to the common 
course of law. The Church, the crown, the dispossessed Royalists, 
reentered triumphantly on their lands ; there were no means of 
repelling the owners' claim, nor any satisfaction to be looked for 
by the purchasers under so defective a title. It must be owned 
that the facility with which this was accomplished is a striking 
testimony to the strength of the new government and the con- 
currence of the nation. This is the more remarkable, if it be true, 
as Ludlow informs us, that the chapter lands had been sold by the 
trustees appointed by Parliament at the clear income of fifteen or 
seventeen years' purchase. 

The great body, however, of the suffering cavaliers, who had 



396 English Historians 

compounded for their delinquency under the ordinances of the 
Long Parliament, or whose estates had been for a time in seques- 
tration, found no remedy for these losses by any process of law. 
The Act of Indemnity put a stop to any suits they might have 
instituted against persons concerned in carrying these illegal or- 
dinances into execution. They were compelled to put up with 
their poverty, having the additional mortification of seeing one 
class, namely, the clergy, who had been engaged in the same 
cause, not alike in their fortune, and many even of the vanquished 
republicans undisturbed in wealth which, directly or indirectly, 
they deemed acquired at their own expense. They called the 
statute an Act of Indemnity for the king's enemies, and of oblivion 
for his friends. They murmured at the ingratitude of Charles, as 
if he were bound to forfeit his honor and risk his throne for their 
sakes. They conceived a deep hatred of Clarendon, whose steady 
adherence to the great principles of the Act of Indemnity is the 
most honorable act of his public life. And the discontent engen- 
dered by their disappointed hopes led to some part of the oppo- 
sition afterwards experienced by the king and still more certainly 
to the coalition against the minister. 

§ 4. Abolition of Ancient Feudal Burdens 

No one cause had so eminently contributed to the dissensions 
between the crown and Parliament, in the last two reigns, as the 
disproportion between the public revenues under a rapidly in- 
creasing depreciation in the value of money and the exigencies, at 
least on some occasions, of the administration. There could be 
no apology for the parsimonious reluctance of the Commons to 
grant supplies, except the constitutional necessity of rendering 
them the condition of redress of grievances; and in the present 
circumstances, satisfied, as they seemed at least to be, with the 
securities they had obtained, and enamoured of their new sovereign, 
it was reasonable to make some further provision for the current 
expenditure. Yet this was to be meted out with such prudence as 
not to place him beyond the necessity of frequent recurrence to 
their aid. A committee was accordingly appointed "to consider of 
settling such a revenue on his Majesty as may maintain the splendor 
and grandeur of his kingly office, and preserve the crown from want 
and from being undervalued by his neighbors." By their report 
it appeared that the revenue of Charles I from 1637 to 1641 had 
amounted on an average to about £900,000, of which full £200,000 



Restoration Settlement in State and Church 397 

arose from sources either not warranted by law or no longer available. 
The House resolved to raise the present king's income to £1,200,000 
per annum, a sum perhaps sufficient in those times for the ordinary 
charges of government. But the funds assigned to produce his 
revenue soon fell short of the Parliament's calculation. 

One ancient fountain that had poured its stream into the royal 
treasury it was now determined to close up forever. The feudal 
tenures had brought with them at the Conquest, or not long after, 
those incidents, as they were usually called, or emoluments of 
seigniory, which remained after the military character of fiefs had 
been nearly effaced, especially the right of detaining the estates of 
minors holding in chivalry without accounting for the profits. 
This galling burden, incomparably more ruinous to the tenant than 
beneficial to the lord, it had long been determined to remove. 
Charles, at the treaty of Newport, had consented to give it up for 
a fixed revenue of £100,000, and this was almost the only part 
of that ineffectual compact which the present Parliament were 
anxious to complete. The king, though likely to lose much 
patronage and influence, and what passed with lawyers for a high 
attribute of his prerogative, could not decently refuse a commu- 
tation so evidently advantageous to the aristocracy. No great 
difference of opinion subsisting as to the expediency of taking away 
military tenures, it remained only to decide from what resources 
the commutation revenue should spring. Two schemes were 
suggested : the one, a permanent tax on lands held in chivalry 
(which, as distinguished from those in socage, were alone liable 
to the feudal burdens) ; the other an excise on beer and some other 
liquors. It is evident that the former was founded on a just prin- 
ciple, while the latter transferred a particular burden to the com- 
munity. But the self-interest which so unhappily predominates 
even in representative assemblies, with the aid of the courtiers who 
knew that an excise increasing with the riches of the country was 
far more desirable for the crown than a fixed land-tax, caused the 
former to be carried, though by the very small majority of two 
voices. Yet even thus, if the impoverishment of the gentry, and 
dilapidation of their estates through the detestable abuses of ward- 
ship was, as cannot be doubted, very mischievous to the inferior 
classes, the whole community must be reckoned gainers by the 
arrangement, though it might have been conducted in a more 
equitable manner. 

The statute 12 Car. II, c. 24, takes away the court of wards, with 
all wardships and forfeitures for marriage by reason of tenure, all 



398 English Historians 

primer seizins and fines for alienation, aids, escuages, homages, 
and tenures by chivalry without exception, save the honorary 
services of grand sergeanty, converting all such tenures into 
common socage. The same statute abolishes those famous rights 
of purveyance and preemption, the fruitful theme of so many com- 
plaining Parliaments; and this relief of the people from a gen- 
eral burden may serve in some measure as an apology for the 
imposition of the excise. This act may be said to have wrought 
an important change in the spirit of our constitution, by reducing 
what is emphatically called the prerogative of the crown, and which, 
by its practical exhibition in these two vexatious exercises of power, 
wardship and purveyance, kept up in the minds of the people a 
more distinct perception, as well as more awe, of the monarchy, 
than could be felt in later periods, when it has become, as it were, 
merged in the common course of law, and blended with the very 
complex mechanism of our institutions. This great innovation, 
however, is properly to be referred to the revolution of 1641, which 
put an end to the court of star chamber, and suspended the feudal 
superiorities. Hence with all the misconduct of the two last 
Stuarts, and all the tendency towards arbitrary power that their 
government often displayed, we must perceive that the constitution 
had put on, in a very great degree, its modern character during 
that period ; the boundaries of prerogative were better understood ; 
its pretensions, at least in public, were less enormous ; and not so 
many violent and oppressive, certainly not so many illegal, acts 
were committed towards individuals as under the two first of their 
family. 

§ 5. Disbandment of the Army 

In fixing upon £1,200,000 as a competent revenue for the crown, 
the Commons tacitly gave it to be understood that a regular military 
force was not among the necessities for which they meant to provide. 
They looked upon the army, notwithstanding its recent services, 
with that apprehension and jealousy which became an English 
House of Commons. They were still supporting it by monthly 
assessments of £70,000, and could gain no relief by the king's 
restoration till that charge came to an end. A bill therefore was 
sent up to the Lords before their adjournment in September, 
providing money for disbanding the land forces. This was done 
during the recess: the soldiers received their arrears with many 
fair words of praise, and the nation saw itself, with delight and 
thankfulness to the king, released from its heavy burdens and the 



Restoration Settlement in State and Church 399 

dread of servitude. Yet Charles had too much knowledge of 
foreign countries, where monarchy flourished in all its plenitude 
of sovereign power under the guardian sword of a standing army, 
to part readily with so favorite an instrument of kings. 

Some of his counsellors, and especially the Duke of York, dis- 
suaded him from disbanding the army, or at least advised his 
supplying its place by another. The unsettled state of the king- 
dom after so momentous a revolution, the dangerous audacity of 
the fanatical party, whose enterprises were the more to be guarded 
against because they were founded on no such calculation as 
reasonable men would form, and of which the insurrection of 
Venner in November, 1660, furnished an example, did undoubtedly 
appear a very plausible excuse for something more of a military 
protection to the government than yeomen of the guard and gen- 
tlemen pensioners. General Monk's regiment, called the Cold- 
stream, and one other of horse, were accordingly retained by 
the king in his service ; another was formed out of troops brought 
from Dunkirk; and thus began, under the name of guards, the 
present regular army of Great Britain. In 1662 these amounted 
to about 5000 men — a petty force according to our present notions 
or to the practice of other European monarchies in that age, yet 
sufficient to establish an alarming precedent, and to open a new 
source of contention between the supporters of power and those of 
freedom. 

So little essential innovation had been effected by twenty years' 
interruption of the regular government in the common law or 
course of judicial proceedings, that, when the king and House of 
Lords were restored to their places, little more seemed to be requisite 
than a change of names. But what was true of the State could not 
be applied to the Church. The revolution there had gone much 
further, and the questions of restoration and compromise were 
far more difficult. . . . 

§ 6. Establishment of Anglican Predominance 

The new Parliament gave the first proofs of their disposition 
by voting that all their members should receive the sacrament on a 
certain day according to the rites of the Church of England, and 
that the solemn league and covenant should be burned by the com- 
mon hangman. They excited still more serious alarm by an 
evident reluctance .to confirm the late Act of Indemnity, which the 
king at the opening of the session had pressed upon their attention. 



400 English Historians 

Those who had suffered the sequestrations and other losses 
of a vanquished party could not endure to abandon what they 
reckoned a just reparation. But Clarendon adhered with equal 
integrity and prudence to this fundamental principle of the Res- 
toration ; and after a strong message from the king on the subject, 
the Commons were content to let the bill pass with no new excep- 
tions. They gave, indeed, some relief to the ruined cavaliers by 
voting £60,000 to be distributed among that class ; but so inade- 
quate a compensation did not assuage their discontent. . . . 

No time was lost, as might be expected from the temper of the 
Commons, in replacing the throne on its constitutional basis after 
the rude encroachments of the Long Parliament. They declared 
that there was no legislative power in either or both houses without 
the king ; that the league and covenant was unlawfully imposed ; 
that the sole supreme command of the militia, and of all forces by 
sea and land, had ever been by the laws of England the undoubted 
right of the crown ; that neither house of parliament could pretend 
to it, nor could lawfully levy any war offensive or defensive against 
his Majesty. These last words appeared to go to a dangerous 
length, and to sanction the suicidal doctrine of absolute non- 
resistance. They made the law of high-treason more strict during 
the king's life in pursuance of a precedent in the reign of Elizabeth. 
They restored the bishops to their seats in the House of Lords — a 
step which the last Parliament would never have been induced to 
take, but which met with little opposition from the present. The 
violence that had attended their exclusion seemed a sufficient 
motive for rescinding a statute so improperly obtained, even if the 
policy of maintaining the spiritual peers were somewhat doubtful. 
The remembrance of those tumultuous assemblages which had 
overawed their predecessors in the winter of 1641, and at other 
times, produced a law against disorderly petitions. This statute 
provides that no petition or address shall be presented to the king 
or either house of Parliament by more than ten persons ; nor shall 
any one procure above twenty persons to consent or set their hands 
to any petition for alteration of matters established by law in 
Church or State, unless with the previous order of three justices 
of the county, or the major part of the grand jury. 

Thus far the new Parliament might be said to have acted chiefly 
on a principle of repairing the breaches recently made in our con- 
stitution, and of reestablishing the just boundaries of the executive 
power; nor would much objection have been offered to their 
measures had they gone no farther in the same course. The act 



Restoration Settlement in State and Church 401 

for regulating corporations is much more questionable, and dis- 
played a determination to exclude a considerable portion of the 
community from their civil rights. It enjoined all magistrates 
and persons bearing offices of trust in corporations to swear that 
they believed it unlawful, on any pretence whatever, to take arms 
against the king, and that they abhorred the traitorous position 
of bearing arms by his authority against his person, or against 
those that are commissioned by him. They were also to renounce 
all obligation arising out of the oath called the solemn league and 
covenant ; in case of refusal to be immediately removed from office. 
Those elected in future were, in addition to the same oaths, to have 
received the sacrament within one year before their election ac- 
cording to the rights of the English Church. These provisions 
struck at the heart of the Presbyterian party whose strength lay in 
the little oligarchies of corporate towns, which directly or indirectly 
returned to Parliament a very large proportion of its members. 
Yet it rarely happens that a political faction is crushed by the 
terrors of an oath. Many of the more rigid Presbyterians refused 
the conditions imposed by this act; but the majority found pre- 
texts for qualifying themselves. . . . 

A determination having been taken to admit of no extensive 
comprehension in religious matters, it was debated by the gov- 
ernment whether to make a few alterations in the Liturgy, or to 
restore the ancient service in every particular. The former 
advice prevailed, though with no desire or expectation of concil- 
iating any scrupulous persons by the amendments introduced. 
These were by no means numerous, and in some instances rather 
chosen in order to irritate and mock the opposite party than from 
any compliance with their prejudices. It is indeed very probable 
from the temper of the new Parliament that they would not have 
come into more tolerant and healing measures. When the Act 
of Uniformity was brought into the House of Lords, it was found not 
only to restore all the ceremonies and other matters to which 
objection had been taken, but to contain fresh clauses more in- 
tolerable than the rest to the Presbyterian clergy. One of these 
enacted that not only every beneficed minister, but fellow of a 
college, or even schoolmaster, should declare his unfeigned assent 
and consent to all and everything contained in the Book of Common 
Prayer. These words, however capable of being eluded and 
explained away, as such subscriptions always are, seemed to 
amount, in common use of language, to a complete approbation 
of an entire volume, such as a man of sense hardly gives to any 

2D 



402 English Historians 

book, and which, at a time when scrupulous persons were with 
great difficulty endeavoring to reconcile themselves to submission, 
placed a new stumbling-block in their way, which, without aban- 
doning their integrity, they found it impossible to surmount. . . . 

§ 7. Expulsion of Non-conforming Parsons 

The new Act of Uniformity succeeded to the utmost wishes of its 
promoters. It provided that every minister should, before the 
feast of St. Bartholomew, 1662, publicly declare his assent and con- 
sent to everything contained in the Book of Common Prayer, on 
pain of being ipso facto deprived of his benefice. When the day 
of St. Bartholomew came, about two thousand persons resigned their 
preferments rather than stain their consciences by compliance — an 
act to which the more liberal Anglicans, after the bitterness of 
immediate passions had passed away, have accorded that praise 
which is due to heroic virtue in an enemy. It may justly be said 
that the Episcopal clergy had set an example of similar magnanimity 
in refusing to take the covenant. Yet, as that was partly of a 
political nature, and those who were ejected for not taking it 
might hope to be restored through the success of the king's arms, 
I do not know that it was altogether so eminent an act of self- 
devotion as the Presbyterian clergy displayed on St. Bartholomew's 
day. Both of them afford striking contrasts to the pliancy of 
the English Church in the greater question of the preceding century, 
and bear witness to a remarkable integrity and consistency of 
principle. . . . 

Some had believed, among whom Clarendon seems to have been, 
that all scruples of tender conscience in the Presbyterian clergy being 
faction and hypocrisy, they would submit very quietly to the law, 
when they found all their clamor unavailing to obtain a dispen- 
sation from it. The resignation of two thousand beneficed ministers 
at once, instead of extorting praise, rather inflamed the resentment 
of their bigoted enemies, especially when they perceived that a 
public and perpetual toleration of separate worship was favored 
by part of the court. Rumors of conspiracies and insurrections, 
sometimes false, but gaining credit from the notorious discontent 
both of the old Commonwealth's party, and of many who had never 
been on that side, were sedulously propagated, in order to keep up 
the animosity of Parliament against the ejected clergy; and these 
are recited as the pretext of an act passed in 1664 for suppressing 
seditious conventicles (the epithet being in this place wantonly 



Restoration Settlement In State and Church 403 

and unjustly insulting), which inflicted on all persons above the age 
of sixteen, present at any religious meeting in any other manner 
than is allowed by the practice of the Church of England, where 
five or more persons besides the household should be present, a 
penalty of three months' imprisonment for the first offence, of 
six for the second, and of seven years' transportation for the third, 
on conviction before a single justice of the peace. This act, says 
Clarendon, if it had been vigorously executed, would no doubt have 
produced a thorough reformation. Such is ever the language 
of the supporters of tyranny; when oppression does not succeed, 
it is because there has been too little of it. But those who suffered 
under this statute report very differently as to its vigorous execu- 
tion. The jails were filled not only with ministers who had borne 
the brunt of former persecutions, but with the laity who attended 
them ; and the hardship was the more grievous that, the act being 
ambiguously worded, its construction was left to a single magis- 
trate, generally very adverse to the accused. 



Bibliographical Note 

Ranke, History of England, Vol. Ill, pp. 311 ff. Masson, Life of Mil- 
ton, Vol. VI. Burnet, My Own Time, a charming work by a contemporary. 
Abbott, The Long Parliament of Charles II, in the English Historical 
Review, January and April, 1906. For the important documents, Robertson, 
Select Statutes, Cases, and Documents. 



CHAPTER VIII 

JAMES II AND THE CATHOLIC REACTION 

Charles II, though Catholic at heart and a firm believer in 
absolutism, as far as he was capable of any convictions, was deter- 
mined not to lose his throne as his father had done. James II, 
however, did not possess the qualities of indifference and compro- 
mise which characterized his brother. He was not only Catholic, 
but he wanted to see the English nation converted to his faith. 
He was determined to allow no obstacle to prevent the realization 
of his cherished plans. He therefore took advantage of many 
points on which the royal power was not explicitly defined, and 
resorted to measures which really violated the spirit if not the letter 
of the law and custom of the constitution. The result was the 
awakening of an opposition which expelled him from his throne. 
The most brilliant account of this Revolution of 1688 is by the 
great Whig historian Macaulay, whose sympathies, with the cause 
of the Revolution gave him a remarkable insight into the views of 
the leaders, but prevented his doing justice to both parties. 

§ 1 . Undefined Royal Prerogatives l 

From his predecessors James had inherited two prerogatives, 
of which the limits had never been defined with strict accuracy, and 
which, if exerted without any limit, would of themselves have 
sufficed to overturn the whole polity of the State and of the 
Church. These were the dispensing power and the ecclesiastical 
supremacy. By means of the dispensing power, the king pur- 
posed to admit Roman Catholics, not merely to civil and military, 
but to spiritual, offices. By means of the ecclesiastical supremacy 
he hoped to make the Anglican clergy his instruments for the 
destruction of their own religion. 

1 Macaulay, History of England, chaps, vi-viii. 
404 



James II and the Catholic Reaction 405 

This scheme developed itself by degrees. It was not thought 
safe to begin by granting to the whole Roman Catholic body a 
dispensation from all statutes imposing penalties and tests. For 
nothing was more fully established than that such a dispensation 
was illegal. The Cabal had, in 1672, put forth a general Declar- 
ation of Indulgence. The Commons, as soon as they met, had 
protested against it. Charles the Second had ordered it to be can- 
celled in his presence, and had, both by his own mouth and by 
a written message, assured the houses that the step which had 
caused so much complaint should never be drawn into precedent. 
It would have been difficult to find in all the Inns of Court a 
barrister of reputation to argue in defence of a prerogative which 
the sovereign, seated on his throne in full Parliament, had sol- 
emnly renounced a few years before. But it was not quite so clear 
that the king might not, on special grounds, grant exemptions to 
individuals by name. The first object of James, therefore, was 
to obtain from the courts of common law an acknowledgment that, 
to this extent at least, he possessed the dispensing power. 

§ 2. Coercion of the Courts 

But though his pretensions were moderate when compared 
with those which he put forth a few months later, he soon found 
that he had against him almost the whole sense of Westminster 
Hall. Four of the judges gave him to understand that they 
could not, on this occasion, serve his purpose ; and it is remarkable 
that all the four were violent Tories, and that among them were 
men who had accompanied Jeffreys on the Bloody Circuit, and 
who had been consenting to the death of Cornish and of Elizabeth 
Gaunt. Jones, the Chief- Justice of the Common Pleas, a man 
who had never before shrunk from any drudgery, however cruel 
or servile, now held in the royal closet language which might 
have become the lips of the purest magistrates in our history. He 
was plainly told that he must either give up his opinion or his place. 
"For my place," he answered, "I care little. I am old and worn 
out in the service of the crown; but I am mortified to find that 
your Majesty thinks me capable of giving a judgment which none 
but an ignorant or a dishonest man could give." "I am deter- 
mined," said the king, "to have twelve judges who will be all of 
my mind as to this matter." "Your Majesty," answered Jones, 
"may find twelve judges of your mind, but hardly twelve lawyers." 
He was dismissed, together with Montague, Chief Baron of the 



406 English Historians 

Exchequer, and two puisne judges, Neville and Charlton. One 
of the new judges was Christopher Milton, younger brother of 
the great poet. Of Christopher little is known, except that in the 
time of the Civil War he had been a Royalist, and that he now, in 
his old age, leaned towards popery. It does not appear that he 
was ever formally reconciled to the Church of Rome; but he 
certainly had scruples about communicating with the Church of 
England, and had therefore a strong interest in supporting the 
dispensing power. 

The king found his counsel as refractory as his judges. The 
first barrister who learned that he was expected to defend the 
dispensing power was the solicitor-general, Heneage Finch. He 
peremptorily refused, and was turned out of office on the following 
day. The attorney-general, Sawyer, was ordered to draw war- 
rants authorizing members of the Church of Rome to hold bene- 
fices belonging to the Church of England. Sawyer had been 
deeply concerned in some of the harshest and most unjustifiable 
prosecutions of that age, and the Whigs abhorred him as a man 
stained with the blood of Russell and Sidney; but on this occasion 
he showed no want of honesty or of resolution. "Sir," said he, 
"this is not merely to dispense with a statute; it is to annul the 
whole statute law from the accession of Elizabeth to the present 
day. I dare not do it, and I implore your "Majesty to consider 
whether such an attack upon the rights of the Church be in accord- 
ance with your late gracious promises." Sawyer would have 
been instantly dismissed, as Finch had been, if the government 
could have found a successor ; but this was no easy matter. It was 
necessary, for the protection of the rights of the crown, that one 
at least of the crown lawyers should be a man of learning, ability, 
and experience, and no such man was willing to defend the dis- 
pensing power. The attorney-general was therefore permitted 
to retain his place during some months. Thomas Powis, an 
obscure barrister who had no qualification for high employment 
except servility, was appointed solicitor. 

§ 3. The Hales Case and Public Employment of Catholics 

The preliminary arrangements were now complete. There 
was a solicitor-general to argue for the dispensing power, and a 
bench of judges to decide in favor of it. The question was there- 
fore speedily brought to a hearing. Sir Edward Hales, a gentleman 
of Kent, had been converted to popery in days when it was not safe 



James II and the Catholic Reaction 407 

for any man of note openly to declare himself a Papist. He had 
kept his secret, and, when questioned, had affirmed that he was a 
Protestant with a solemnity which did little credit to his principles. 
When James had ascended the throne, disguise was no longer 
necessary. Sir Edward publicly apostatized, and was rewarded 
with the command of a regiment of foot. He had held his com- 
mission more than three months without taking the sacrament. 
He was therefore liable to a penalty of five hundred pounds, which 
an informer might recover by action of debt. A menial servant 
was employed to bring a suit for this sum in the Court of King's 
Bench. Sir Edward did not dispute the facts alleged against him, 
but pleaded that he had letters-patent authorizing him to hold his 
commission notwithstanding the Test Act. The plaintiff demurred, 
that is to say, admitted Sir Edward's plea to be true in fact, but 
denied that it was a sufficient answer. Thus was raised a simple 
issue of law to be decided by the court. A barrister, who was 
notoriously a tool of the government, appeared for the mock 
plaintiff and made some feeble objections to the defendent's plea. 
The new solicitor-general replied. The attorney-general took 
no part in the proceedings. Judgment was given by the Lord 
Chief-Justice, Sir Edward Herbert. He announced that he had 
submitted the question to all the twelve judges, and that, in the 
opinion of eleven of them, the king might lawfully dispense with 
penal statutes in particular cases, and for special reasons of grave 
importance. The single dissentient, Baron Street, was not re- 
moved from his place. He was a man of morals so bad that his 
own relations shrank from him, and that the Prince of Orange, 
at the time of the Revolution, was advised not to see him. The 
character of Street makes it impossible to believe that he would 
have been more scrupulous than his brethren. The character 
of James makes it impossible to believe that a refractory Baron 
of the Exchequer would have been permitted to retain his post. 
There can, therefore, be no reasonable doubt that the dissenting 
judge was, like the plaintiff and the plaintiff's council, acting 
collusively. It was important that there should be a great pre- 
ponderance of authority in favor of the dispensing power ; yet it 
was important that the bench, which had been carefully packed 
for the occasion, should appear to be independent. One judge, 
therefore, the least respectable of the twelve, was permitted, or 
more probably commanded, to give his voice against the pre- 
rogative. 

The power which the courts of law had thus recognized was 



408 English Historians 

not suffered to lie idle. Within a month after the decision of the 
King's Bench had been pronounced four Roman Catholic Lords 
were sworn of the Privy Council. Two of them, Powis and Bel- 
lasyse, were of the Moderate party, and probably took their seats 
with reluctance and with many sad forebodings. The other two, 
Arundell and Dover, had no such misgivings. . . . 

§ 4. Rapid Development of Catholicism 

The temper of the nation was indeed such as might well make 
the king hesitate. During some months discontent had been 
steadily and rapidly increasing. The celebration of the Roman 
Catholic worship had long been prohibited by act of Parliament. 
During several generations no Roman Catholic clergyman had 
dared to exhibit himself in any public place with the badges of 
his office. Against the regular clergy, and against the restless and 
subtle Jesuits by name, had been enacted a succession of rigorous 
statutes. Every Jesuit who set foot in this country was liable to 
be hanged, drawn, and quartered. A reward was offered for his 
detection. He was not allowed to take advantage of the general 
rule, that men are not bound to accuse themselves. Whoever 
was suspected of being a Jesuit might be interrogated, and, if he 
refused to answer, might be sent to prison for life. These laws, 
though they had not, except when there was supposed to be some 
peculiar danger, been strictly executed, and though they had never 
prevented Jesuits from resorting to England, had made disguise 
necessary. 

But all disguise was now thrown off. Injudicious members 
of the king's Church, encouraged by him, took a pride in defying 
statutes which were still of undoubted validity, and feelings which 
had a stronger hold of the national mind than at any former 
period. Roman Catholic chapels rose all over the country. 
Cowls, girdles of ropes, and strings of beads constantly appeared 
in the streets, and astonished a population, the oldest of whom 
had never seen a conventual garb except on the stage. A convent 
arose at Clerkenwell, on the site of the ancient cloister of St. 
John. The Franciscans occupied a mansion in Lincoln's Inn 
Fields. The Carmelites were quartered in the city. A society 
of Benedictine monks was lodged in St. James's Palace. In the 
Savoy a spacious house, including a church and a school, was built 
for the Jesuits. The skill and care with which those fathers had, 
during several generations, conducted the education of youth, had 



James II and the Catholic Reaction 409 

drawn forth reluctant praises from the wisest Protestants. Bacon 
had pronounced the mode of instruction followed in the Jesuit 
colleges to be the best yet known in the world, and had warmly- 
expressed his regret that so admirable a system of intellectual 
and moral discipline should be employed on the side of error. 
It was not improbable that the new academy in the Savoy might, 
under royal patronage, prove a formidable rival to the great foun- 
dations of Eton, Westminster, and Winchester. Indeed, soon 
after the school was opened, the classes consisted of four hundred 
boys, about one-half of whom were Protestants. The Protestant 
pupils were not required to attend mass; but there could be no 
doubt that the influence of able preceptors, devoted to the Roman 
Catholic Church, and versed in all the arts which win the con- 
fidence and affection of youth, would make many converts. 

These things produced great excitement among the populace, 
which is always more moved by what impresses the senses than by 
what is addressed to the reason. Thousands of rude and ignorant 
men, to whom the dispensing power and the Ecclesiastical Com- 
mission were words without a meaning, saw with dismay and 
indignation a Jesuit college rising on the banks of the Thames, 
friars in hoods and gowns walking in the Strand, and crowds of 
devotees pressing in at the doors of temples where homage was 
paid to graven images. Riots broke out in several parts of the 
country. At Coventry and Worcester the Roman Catholic wor- 
ship was violently interrupted. At Bristol the rabble, counte- 
nanced, it was said, by the magistrates, exhibited a profane and 
indecent pageant, in which the Virgin Mary was represented by a 
buffoon, and in which a mock host was carried in procession. 
Soldiers were called out to disperse the mob. The mob, then and 
ever since one of the fiercest in the kingdom, resisted. Blows 
were exchanged, and serious hurts inflicted. The agitation was 
great in the capital, and greater in the city, properly so called, 
than at Westminster. For the people of Westminster had been 
accustomed to see among them the private chapels of Roman 
Catholic ambassadors; but the city had not, within living mem- 
ory, been polluted by any idolatrous exhibition. Now, how- 
ever, the resident of the Elector Palatine, encouraged by the king, 
fitted up a chapel in Lime Street. 

The heads of the corporation, though men selected for office 
on account of their known Toryism, protested against this pro- 
ceeding, which, as they said, the ablest gentlemen of the long robe 
regarded as illegal. The Lord Mayor was ordered to appear 



410 English Historians 

before the Privy Council. "Take heed what you do/' said the 
king; "obey me, and do not trouble yourself either about gentle- 
men of the long robe or gentlemen of the short robe." The Chan- 
cellor took up the word, and reprimanded the unfortunate magis- 
trate with the genuine eloquence of the Old Bailey bar. The 
chapel was opened. All the neighborhood was soon in commotion. 
Great crowds assembled in Cheapside to attack the new mass 
house. The priests were insulted. A crucifix was taken out of 
the building and set up on the parish pump. The Lord Mayor 
came to quell the tumult, but was received with cries of "No 
wooden gods." The train-bands were ordered to disperse the 
crowd; but the train-bands shared in the popular feeling, and 
murmurs were heard from the ranks, "We cannot in conscience 
fight for popery." . . . 

§ 5. The Second Declaration of Indulgence 

On the twenty-seventh of April, 1688, the king put forth a 
second Declaration of Indulgence. In this paper he recited at 
length the Declaration of the preceding April. His past life, he 
said, ought to have convinced his people that he was not a person 
who could easily be induced to depart from any resolution which 
he had formed. But, as designing men had attempted to persuade 
the world that he might be prevailed on to give way in this matter, 
he thought it necessary to proclaim that his purpose was im- 
mutably fixed, that he was resolved to employ those only who were 
prepared to concur in his design, and that he had, in pursuance 
of that resolution, dismissed many of his disobedient servants 
from civil and military employments. He announced that he 
meant to hold a Parliament in November at the latest; and he 
exhorted his subjects to choose representatives who would assist 
him in the great work which he had undertaken. 

This Declaration at first produced little sensation. It contained 
nothing new; and men wondered that the king should think it 
worth while to publish a solemn manifesto merely for the purpose 
of telling them that he had not changed his mind. Perhaps James 
was nettled by the indifference with which the announcement of his 
fixed -resolution was received by the public, and thought that his 
dignity and authority would suffer unless he without delay did 
something novel and striking. On the fourth of May, accordingly, 
he made an order in council that his Declaration of the preceding 
week should be read, on two successive Sundays, at the time of 






James II and the Catholic Reaction 411 

divine service, by the officiating ministers of all the churches and 
chapels of the kingdom. In London and in the suburbs the 
reading was to take place on the twentieth and twenty-seventh of 
May, in other parts of England on the third and tenth of June. The 
bishops were directed to distribute copies of the Declaration 
through their respective dioceses. . . . 

The king's temper was arbitrary and severe. The proceedings 
of the Ecclesiastical Commission were as summary as those of a 
court-martial. Whoever ventured to resist might in a week be 
ejected from his parsonage, deprived of his whole income, pro- 
nounced incapable of holding any other spiritual preferment, and 
left to beg from door to door. If, indeed, the whole body offered 
a united opposition to the royal will, it was probable that even 
James would scarcely venture to punish ten thousand delinquents 
at once. 

But there was not time to form an extensive combination. 
The order in Council was gazetted on the seventh of May. On 
the twentieth the Declaration was to be read in all the pulpits of 
London and the neighborhood. By no exertion was it possible 
in that age to ascertain within a fortnight the intentions of one- 
tenth part of the parochial ministers who were scattered over the 
kingdom. It was not easy to collect in so short a time the sense 
even of the episcopal order. It might also well be apprehended 
that, if the clergy refused to read the Declaration, the Protestant 
Dissenters would misinterpret the refusal, would despair of obtain- 
ing any toleration from the members of the Church of England, 
and would throw their whole weight into the scale of the court. . . . 

At this conjuncture the Protestant Dissenters of London won 
for themselves a title to the lasting gratitude of their country. 
They had hitherto been reckoned by the government as part of its 
strength. A few of their most active and noisy preachers, cor- 
rupted by the favors of the court, had got up addresses in favor 
of the King's policy. Others, estranged by the recollection of many 
cruel wrongs both from the Church of England and from the 
House of Stuart, had seen with resentful pleasure the tyrannical 
prince and the tyrannical hierarchy separated by a bitter enmity, 
and bidding against each other for the help of sects lately perse- 
cuted and despised. But this feeling, however natural, had been 
indulged long enough. 

The time had come when it was necessary to make a choice; 
and the Non-conformists of the city, with a noble spirit, arrayed 
themselves side by side with the members of the Church in defence 



412 English Historians 

of the fundamental laws of the realm. Baxter, Bates, and Howe 
distinguished themselves by their efforts to bring about this coa- 
lition; but the generous enthusiasm which pervaded the whole 
Puritan body made the task easy. The zeal of the flocks outran 
that of the pastors. Those Presbyterian and Independent teachers 
who showed an inclination to take part with the king against the 
ecclesiastical establishment received distinct notice that, unless 
they changed their conduct, their congregations would neither 
hear them nor pay them. Alsop, who had flattered himself that he 
should be able to bring over a great body of his disciples to the 
royal side, found himself on a sudden an object of contempt and 
abhorrence to those who had lately revered him as their spiritual 
guide, sank into a deep melancholy, and hid himself from the public 
eye. Deputations waited on several of the London clergy, implor- 
ing them not to judge of the dissenting body from the servile adu- 
lation which had lately filled the London Gazette, and exhorting 
them, placed as they were in the van of this great fight, to play the 
men for the liberties of England and for the faith delivered to the 
saints. These assurances were received with joy and gratitude. 
Yet there was still much anxiety and much difference of opinion 
among those who had to decide whether, on Sunday the twentieth, 
they would or would not obey the king's command. The London 
clergy, then universally acknowledged to be the flower of their 
profession, held a meeting. Fifteen doctors of divinity were 
present. . . . 

The general feeling of the assembly seemed to be that it was, on 
the whole, advisable to obey the Order in Council. The dispute 
began to wax warm, and might have produced fatal consequences, 
if it had not been brought to a close by the firmness and wisdom 
of Doctor Edward Fowler, Vicar of Saint Giles's, Cripplegate, 
one of a small but remarkable class of divines who united that 
love of civil liberty which belonged to the school of Calvin with the 
theology of the school of Arminius. Standing up, Fowler spoke 
thus: " I must be plain. The question is so simple that argument 
can throw no new light on it, and can only beget heat. Let every 
man say Yes or No. But I cannot consent to be bound by the vote 
of the majority. I shall be sorry to cause a breach of unity. But 
this Declaration I cannot in conscience read." Tillotson, Patrick, 
Sherlock, and Stillingfleet declared that they were of the same mind. 
The majority yielded to the authority of a minority so respectable. 
A resolution by which all present pledged themselves to one another 
not to read the Declaration was then drawn up. Patrick was the 



James II and the Catholic Reaction 413 

first who set his hand to it; Fowler was the second. The paper 
was sent round the city, and was speedily subscribed by eighty-five 
incumbents. 

§ 6. The Protest 0} the Bishops 

Meanwhile several of the bishops were anxiously deliberating 
as to the course which they should take. On the twelfth of May 
a grave and learned company was assembled round the table of 
the primate at Lambeth. Compton, Bishop of London, Turner, 
Bishop of Ely, White, Bishop of Peterborough, and Tenison, 
Rector of Saint Martin's Parish, were among the guests. . . . 
The general opinion was that the Declaration ought not to be read. 
Letters were forthwith written to several of the most respectable 
prelates of the province of Canterbury, entreating them to come 
up without delay to London, and to strengthen the hands of their 
metropolitan at this conjuncture. As there was little doubt that 
these letters would be opened if they passed through the office 
in Lombard Street, they were sent by horsemen to the nearest 
country post-towns on the different roads. The Bishop of Win- 
chester, whose loyalty had been so signally proved at Sedgemoor, 
though suffering from indisposition, resolved to set out in obe- 
dience to the summons, but found himself unable to bear the motion 
of a coach. The letter addressed to William Lloyd, Bishop of 
Norwich, was, in spite of all precautions, detained by a postmaster; 
and that prelate, inferior to none of his brethren in courage and 
zeal for the common cause of his order, did not reach London in 
time. His namesake, William Lloyd, Bishop of Saint Asaph, a 
pious, honest, and learned man, but of slender judgment, and half 
crazed by his persevering endeavors to extract from the Book of 
Daniel and from the Revelation some information about the Pope 
and the king of France, hastened to the capital, and arrived on the 
sixteenth. On the following day came the excellent Ken, Bishop 
of Bath and Wells, Lake, Bishop of Chichester, and Sir John 
Trelawney, Bishop of Bristol, a baronet of an old and honorable 
Cornish family. 

On the eighteenth a meeting of prelates and of other eminent 
divines was held at Lambeth. Tillotson, Tenison, Stillingfleet, 
Patrick, and Sherlock were present. Prayers were solemnly 
read before the consultation began. After long deliberation, a 
petition embodying the general sense was written by the Arch- 
bishop with his own hand. It was not drawn up with much felicity 



414 English Historians 

of style. Indeed, the cumbrous and inelegant structure of the 
sentences brought on Sancroft some raillery, which he bore 
with less patience than he showed under much heavier trials. 
But in substance nothing could be more skilfully framed than this 
memorable document. All disloyalty, all intolerance, was ear- 
nestly disclaimed. The king was assured that the Church was 
still, as she had ever been, faithful to the throne. He was 
assured also that the bishops would, in proper place and time, as 
Lords of Parliament and members of the Upper House of Convo- 
cation, show that they by no means wanted tenderness for the 
conscientious scruples of Dissenters. But Parliament had, both 
in the late and in the present reign, pronounced that the sovereign 
was not constitutionally competent to dispense with statutes in 
matters ecclesiastical. The Declaration was therefore illegal; 
and the petitioners could not, in prudence, honor, or conscience, 
be parties to the solemn publishing of an illegal Declaration in the 
house of God, and during the time of divine service. 

This paper was signed by the Archbishop and by six of his suf- 
fragans, Lloyd of Saint Asaph, Turner of Ely, Lake of Chichester, 
Ken of Bath and Wells, White of Peterborough, and Trelawney of 
Bristol. The Bishop of London, being under suspension, did not 
sign. 

It was now late on Friday evening; and on Sunday morning the 
Declaration was to be read in the churches of London. It was 
necessary to put the paper into the king's hands without delay. 
The six bishops crossed the river to Whitehall. The Archbishop, 
who had long been forbidden the court, did not accompany them. 
Lloyd, leaving his five brethren at the house of Lord Dartmouth in 
the vicinity of the palace, went to Sunderland, and begged that 
minister to read the petition, and to ascertain when the king would 
be willing to receive it. Sunderland, afraid of compromising 
himself, refused to look at the paper, but went immediately to the 
royal closet. James directed that the bishops should be admitted. 
He had heard from his tool Cartwright that they were disposed 
to obey the royal mandate, but that they wished for some little 
modifications in form, and that they meant to present a humble 
request to that effect. His majesty was therefore in a very good 
humor. When they knelt before him, he graciously told them to 
rise, took the paper from Lloyd, and said, "This is my Lord of 
Canterbury's hand." "Yes, sir, his own hand," was the answer. 
James read the petition; he folded it up, and his countenance 
grew dark. "This," he said, "is a great surprise to me. I did 



James II and the Catholic Reaction 415 

not expect this from your Church, especially from some of you. 
This is a standard of rebellion." 

The bishops broke out into passionate professions of loyalty; 
but the king, as usual, repeated the same words over and over. 
"I tell you this is a standard of rebellion." "Rebellion!" cried 
Trelawney, falling on his knees. "For God's sake, sir, do not say 
so hard a thing of us. No Trelawney can be a rebel. Remember 
that my family has fought for the crown. Remember how I served 
your majesty when Monmouth was in the West." u We put down 
the last rebellion," said Lake : "we shall not raise another." "We 
rebel ! " exclaimed Turner; "we are ready to die at your Majesty's 
feet." " Sir," said Ken, in a more manly tone, "I hope that you 
will grant to us that liberty of conscience which you grant to all 
mankind." 

Still James went on. "This is rebellion. This is. a standard 
of rebellion. Did ever a good churchman question the dispensing 
power before ? Have not some of you preached for it and written 
for it ? It is a standard of rebellion. I will have my Declaration 
published." "We have two duties to perform," answered Ken, 
"our duty to God, and our duty to your Majesty. We honor you; 
but we fear God." "Have I deserved this?" said the king, more 
and more angry, "I who have been such a friend to your Church? 
I did not expect this from some of you. I will be obeyed. My 
Declaration shall be published. You are trumpeters of sedition. 
What do you do here ? Go to your dioceses ; and see that I am 
obeyed. I will keep this paper. I will not part with it, I will 
remember you that have signed it." "God's will be done," said 
Ken. "God has given me the dispensing power," said the king, 
"and I will maintain it. I will tell you that there are still seven 
thousand of your Church who have not bowed the knee to Baal." 
The bishops respectfully retired. That very evening the docu- 
ment which they had put into the hands of the king appeared word 
for word in print,, was laid on the tables of all the coffee-houses, 
arid was cried about the streets. Everywhere the people rose from 
their beds, and came out to stop the hawkers. It was said that the 
printer cleared a thousand pounds in a few hours by this penny 
broadside. This is probably an exaggeration; but it is an ex- 
aggeration which proves that the sale was enormous. How the 
petition got abroad is still a mystery. . . . 

In the City and Liberties of London were about a hundred 
parish churches. In only four of these was the Order in Council 
obeyed. At Saint Gregory's the Declaration was read by a divine 



41 6 English Historians 

of the name of Martin. As soon as he uttered the first words, the 
whole congregation rose and withdrew. At Saint Matthew's, in 
Friday Street, a wretch named Timothy Hall, who had disgraced 
his gown by acting as broker for the Duchess of Portsmouth in the 
sale of pardons, and who now had hopes of obtaining the vacant 
bishopric of Oxford, was in like manner left alone in his church. At 
Sergeant's Inn, in Chancery Lane, the clerk pretended that he had 
forgotten to bring a copy; and the Chief Justice of the King's 
Bench, who had attended in order to see that the royal mandate 
was obeyed, was forced to content himself with this excuse. Sam- 
uel Wesley, the father of John and Charles Wesley, a curate in 
London, took for his text that day the noble answer of the three 
Jews to the Chaldean tyrant: "Be it known unto thee, O king, 
that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which 
thou hast set up." Even in the chapel of Saint James's Palace the 
officiating minister had the courage to disobey the order. The 
Westminster boys long remembered what took place that day in 
the Abbey. Sprat, Bishop of Rochester, officiated there as dean. 
As soon as he began to read the Declaration, murmurs and the 
noise of people crowding out of the choir drowned his voice. 
He trembled so violently that men saw the paper shake in his hand. 
Long before he had finished, the place was deserted by all but 
those whose situation made it necessary for them to remain. . . . 
Another week of anxiety and agitation passed away. Sunday 
came again. Again the churches of the capital were thronged 
by hundreds of thousands. The Declaration was read nowhere 
except at the very few places where it had been read the week 
before. The minister who had officiated at the chapel in Saint 
James's Palace had been turned out of his situation; a more 
obsequious divine appeared with the paper in his hand, but his 
agitation was so great that he could not articulate. In truth, the 
feeling of the whole nation had now become such as none but the 
very best and noblest, or the very worst and basest, of mankind 
could without much discomposure encounter. 

Bibliographical Note to Chapters VIII and IX 

Traill, William III. Seeley, Growth of British Policy, Vol. II, pp. 
250 ff. Lecky, History of England in the Eighteenth Century, Vol. I, 
chap. i. Ranke, History of England, Vol. IV, 209 ff. Hallam, Consti- 
tutional History, Vol. II, chaps, xiv. and xv. The documents are to be 
found in Robertson, Select Statutes, Cases, and Documents. 



CHAPTER IX 

THE WHIG REVOLUTION AND SETTLEMENT 

When the actions of James II transcended the bounds of national 
patience, a self-constituted committee of both Whigs and Tories 
invited William, Prince of Orange, to come over with an armed force 
to defend what they regarded as their liberties. William, who 
wanted to draw the country into his continental schemes, accepted 
the invitation, and in November, 1688, landed in England. Deserted 
by his supporters, James could not make even a semblance of 
resistance, and consequently fled to France. In January, 1689, a 
convention parliament called by William declared that the throne 
was vacant and offered the crown to him and Mary. 

§ 1. Discussion of Constitutional Principles 1 

It was now known to whom the crown would be given. On 
what conditions it should be given still remained to be decided. 
The Commons had appointed a committee to consider what steps 
it might be advisable to take, in order to secure law and liberty 
against the aggressions of future sovereigns ; and the committee 
had made a report. This report recommended, first, that those 
great principles of the constitution which had been violated by the 
dethroned king should be solemnly asserted; and, secondly, that 
many new laws should be enacted, for the purpose of curbing the 
prerogative and purifying the administration of justice. Most 
of the suggestions of the committee were excellent ; but it was 
utterly impossible that the Houses could, in a month, or even a year, 
deal properly with matters so numerous, so various, and so important. 
It was proposed, among other things, that the militia should be 
remodelled, that the power which the sovereign possessed of pro- 
roguing and dissolving Parliaments should be restricted ; that the 

1 Macaulay, History of England, chap. x. 
2E 417 



41 8 English Historians 

duration of Parliaments should be limited; that the royal pardon 
should no longer be pleadable to a parliamentary impeachment; 
that toleration should be granted to Protestant Dissenters ; that 
the crime of high treason should be more precisely defined ; that 
trials for high treason should be conducted in a manner more 
favorable to innocence ; that the judges should hold their places 
for life ; that the mode of appointing sheriffs should be altered ; 
that juries should be nominated in such a way as might exclude 
partiality and corruption ; that the practice of filing criminal in- 
formations in the King's Bench should be abolished ; that the 
Court of Chancery should be reformed ; that the fees of public func- 
tionaries should be regulated; and that the law of quo warranto 
should be amended. It was evident that cautious and deliberate 
legislation on these subjects must be the work of more than one 
laborious session ; and it was equally evident that hasty and crude 
legislation on subjects so grave could not but produce new griev- 
ances, worse than those which it might remove. If the committee 
meant to give a list of the reforms which ought to be accomplished 
before the throne was filled, the list was absurdly long. If, on the 
other hand, the committee meant to give a list of all the reforms 
which the legislature would do well to make in proper season, 
the list was strangely imperfect. Indeed, as soon as the report 
had been read, member after member rose to suggest some addition. 
It was moved and carried that the selling of offices should be pro- 
hibited, that the Habeas Corpus Act should be made more efficient, 
and that the, law of mandamus be revised. One gentleman fell 
on the chimneymen; another on the excisemen; and the House 
resolved that the malpractices of both chimneymen and excise- 
men should be restrained. . . . 

The House was greatly perplexed. Some orators vehemently 
said that too much time had been already lost, and that the gov- 
ernment ought to be settled without the delay of a day. Society 
was unquiet ; trade was languishing ; the English colony in Ireland 
was in imminent danger of perishing ; a foreign war was impend- 
ing; the exiled king might, in a few weeks, be at Dublin with a 
French army, and from Dublin he might soon cross to Chester. 
Was it not insanity, at such a crisis, to leave the throne unfilled, 
and, while the very existence of Parliaments was in jeopardy, to 
waste time in debating whether Parliaments should be prorogued 
by the sovereign or by themselves ? On the other side it was asked 
whether the Convention could think that it had fulfilled its mission 
by merely pulling down one prince and putting up another. 



The Whig Revolution and Settlement 419 

Surely now or never was the time to secure public liberty by such 
fences as might effectually prevent the encroachments of preroga- 
tive. There was doubtless great weight in what was urged on 
both sides. The able chiefs of the Whig party, among whom 
Somers was fast rising to ascendency, proposed a middle course. 
The House had, they said, two objects in view, which ought to be 
kept distinct. One object was to secure the old polity of the realm 
against illegal attacks; the other was to improve that polity by 
legal reforms. The former object might be attained by solemnly 
putting on record, in the resolution which called the new sovereigns 
to the throne, the claim of the English nation to its ancient fran- 
chises, so that the king might hold his crown, and the people their 
privileges, by one and the same title-deed. The latter object 
would require a whole volume of elaborate statutes. The former 
object might be attained in a day ; the latter, scarcely in five years. 
As to the former object, all parties were agreed ; as to the latter, 
there were innumerable varieties of opinion. No member of either 
House would hesitate for a moment to vote that the king could not 
levy taxes without the consent of Parliament; but it would be 
hardly possible to frame any new law of procedure in cases of high 
treason which would not give rise to a long debate, and be con- 
demned by some persons as unjust to the prisoner, and by others as 
unjust to the crown. The business of an extraordinary convention 
of the Estates of the Realm was not to do the ordinary work of 
Parliaments, to regulate the fees of masters in chancery, and to 
provide against the exactions of gaugers, but to put right the great 
machine of government. When this had been done, it would be 
time to inquire what improvement our institutions needed; nor 
would anything be risked by delay ; for no sovereign who reigned 
merely by the choice of the nation could long refuse his assent to 
any improvement which the nation, speaking through its represen- 
tatives, demanded. 

§ 2. Formulation of the Declaration of Right 

On these grounds the Commons wisely determined to postpone 
all reforms till the ancient constitution of the kingdom should 
have been restored in all its parts, and forthwith to fill the throne 
without imposing on William and Mary any other obligation than 
that of governing according to the existing laws of England. In 
order that the questions which had been in dispute between the 
Stuarts and the nation might never again be stirred, it was deter- 



420 English Historians 

mined that the instrument by which the Prince and Princess of 
Orange were called to the throne, and by which the order of suc- 
cession was settled, should set forth, in the most distinct and 
solemn manner, the fundamental principles of the constitution. 
This instrument, known by the name of the Declaration of Right, 
was prepared by a committee, of which Somers was chairman. 
The fact that the low-born young barrister was appointed to so 
honorable and important a post in a Parliament filled with able 
and experienced men, only ten days after he. had spoken in the 
House of Commons for the first time, sufficiently proves the supe- 
riority of his abilities. In a few hours the Declaration was 
framed and approved by the Commons. The Lords assented 
to it with some amendments of no great importance. 

The Declaration began by recapitulating the crimes and errors 
which had made a revolution necessary. James had invaded the 
province of the legislature; had treated modest petitioning as a 
crime ; had oppressed the Church by means of an illegal tribunal ; 
had, without the consent of Parliament, levied taxes and main- 
tained a standing army in time of peace ; had violated the freedom 
of election, and perverted the cause of justice. Proceedings which 
could lawfully be questioned only in Parliament had been made the 
subjects of prosecution in the King's Bench. Partial and corrupt 
juries had been returned; excessive bail had been required from 
prisoners; excessive fines had been imposed; barbarous and un- 
usual punishments had been inflicted ; the estates of accused persons 
had been granted away before conviction. He, by whose authority 
these things had been done, had abdicated the government. The 
Prince of Orange, whom God had made the glorious instrument 
of delivering the nation from superstition and tyranny, had invited 
the Estates of the Realm to meet and to take counsel together for the 
securing of religion, of law, and of freedom. The Lords and Com- 
mons, having deliberated, had resolved that they would first, after 
the example of their ancestors, assert the ancient rights and liber- 
ties of England. Therefore it was declared that the dispensing 
power, as lately assumed and exercised, had no legal existence; 
that, without grant of Parliament, no money could be exacted by 
the sovereign from the subject; that, without consent of Parlia- 
ment, no standing army could be kept up in time of peace. The 
right of subjects to petition, the right of electors to choose represen- 
tatives freely, the right of the legislature to freedom of debate, 
the right of the nation to a pure and merciful administration of 
justice according to the spirit of our mild laws, were solemnly 



The Whig Revolution and Settlement 421 

affirmed. All these things, the Commons claimed, as the un- 
doubted inheritance of Englishmen. Having thus vindicated 
the principles of the constitution, the Lords and Commons, in 
the entire confidence that the deliverer would hold sacred the laws 
and liberties which he had saved, resolved that William and Mary, 
Prince and Princess of Orange, should be declared king and queen 
of England for their joint and separate lives, and that during their 
joint lives, the administration of the government should be in the 
Prince alone. After them the crown was settled on the posterity 
of Mary, then on Anne and her posterity, and then on the pos- 
terity of William. . . . 

§ 3. William and Mary Proclaimed 

On the morning of Wednesday, the thirteenth of February, the 
court of Whitehall and all the neighboring streets were filled with 
gazers. The magnificent banqueting house, the masterpiece of 
Inigo, embellished by masterpieces of Rubens, had been prepared 
for a great ceremony. The walls were lined by the yeomen of the 
guard. Near the northern door, on the right hand, a large number 
of Peers had assembled. On the left were the Commons with 
their Speaker, attended by the mace. The southern door opened ; 
and the Prince and Princess of Orange, side by side, entered, and 
took their place under the canopy of state. 

Both Houses approached, bowing low. William and Mary 
advanced a few steps. Halifax on the right, and Powle on the left, 
stood forth; and Halifax spoke. The Convention, he said, had 
agreed to a resolution which he prayed their Highnesses to hear. 
They signified their assent ; and the clerk of the House of Lords 
read, in a loud voice, the Declaration of Right. When he had 
concluded, Halifax, in the name of all the Estates of the Realm, 
requested the prince and princess to accept the crown. 

William, in his own name and in that of his wife, answered that 
the crown was, in their estimation, the more valuable because it 
was presented to them as a token of the confidence of the nation. 
"We thankfully accept," he said, "what you have offered us." 
Then, for himself, he assured them that the laws of England, 
which he had once already vindicated, should be the rules of his 
conduct, that it should be his study to promote the welfare of the 
kingdom, and that, as to the means of doing so, he should con- 
stantly recur to the advice of the Houses, and should be disposed 
to trust their judgment rather than his own. These words were 



4-22 English Historians 

received with a shout of joy which was heard in the streets below 
and was instantly answered by huzzas from many thousands of 
voices. The Lords and Commons then reverently retired from the 
banqueting house and went in procession to the great gate of 
Whitehall, where the heralds and pursuivants were waiting in 
their gorgeous tabards. All the space as far as Charing Cross was 
one sea of heads. The kettledrums struck up ; the trumpets 
pealed ; and Garter king at arms, in a loud voice, proclaimed the 
Prince and Princess of Orange king and queen of England, charged 
all Englishmen to bear, from that moment, true allegiance to the 
new sovereigns, and besought God, who had already wrought so 
signal a deliverance for our Church and nation, to bless William 
and Mary with a long and happy reign. 



PART VI 

THE EXPANSION OF ENGLAND 

CHAPTER I 

MOTIVES FOR COLONIZATION 

At the opening of the sixteenth century, while the Portuguese 
were enriching themselves by the trade of the East, and the Span- 
iards were carving out new dominions in Mexico and Peru, it 
looked as if England was destined to be a small insular power. 
But it was not to be so, for within three or four generations, Eng- 
lish ships were in every sea and Englishmen were embarking on 
commercial and colonial enterprises which were in time to out- 
rival those of every other nation. As a result of this, the inter- 
national politics of Europe for the last three centuries can be under- 
stood solely in the light of the economic interests engendered in 
the race for markets and territorial dominion. English activities 
spread to the four corners of the earth, and within England interests 
and policies were developed which transformed that country from 
a feudal into an industrial state. It therefore becomes imperative 
that one should study the industrial and commercial forces which 
have been so predominant in the modern age. The fullest and 
most scholarly account of these great, interests is to be found in 
Dr. Cunningham's Growth of English Industry and Commerce, 
from which this analysis of early motives for colonization is taken. 

§ i. Questionable Advantages of Colonization 1 

Much had been done, before the seventeenth century opened, 
in developing the maritime power of England, but the process 

1 Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce (1904), Vol. 
II, Part I. pp. 331 ff. By permission of Dr. Cunningham and the Cam- 
bridge University Press. 

423 



424 English Historians 

of settling in distant lands had hardly begun. The foundations 
of our colonial empire were laid during the reigns of the Stuarts. 
At the accession of James I, Englishmen had not established their 
footing either in Asia, Africa, or the American continent. Their 
hold upon Newfoundland, with a share in the fisheries off its coast, 
gave them their only sphere of influence in distant regions ; for 
their attempts to plant in Virginia had not so far been crowned 
with success. But within ninety years there was a marvellous 
change. At the Peace of Ryswick, England was secure in the 
possession of more or less extensive territories in Africa, in 
North and in South America. The East India Company and 
Hudson's Bay Company had several valuable factories for trade, 
and St. Helena, the Bahamas, Bermudas, Jamaica, and other 
West Indian islands had also been acquired. There is no side 
of economic life in which the progress during this period was 
so marked as in colonization; it is the new and characteristic 
contribution of this century to the development of England's 
material greatness. 

There has been much discussion at various times as to the benefit 
which colonies confer on the mother country; Whigs in the eigh- 
teenth, and the Manchester School in the nineteenth century, were 
inclined to disparage them as a mere encumbrance, and would not 
have been unwilling to be rid of them altogether. We have com- 
pletely outlived that feeling; but the fact that the advantage or 
disadvantage of developing colonies abroad continued for so long 
to be a subject of dispute, makes it necessary to inquire carefully 
into the reasons which weighed with the men who acted as the 
pioneers in the expansion of England. The difficulties which 
thev had to face were enormous ; the distance of the colonists from 
the mother country, and the irregularity of communication, exposed 
them to serious perils ; while their ignorance of the climate, and the 
uncertainty of their relations with the natives, proved nearly fatal 
to more than one enterprise. 

We must also bear in mind that there was in many quarters 
a feeling not merely of indifference, but of positive antagonism to 
these undertakings. Like the distant trade of the East India Com- 
pany, these settlements seemed to divert labor and capital that 
could be usefully employed on English soil, without any compen- 
sating advantage. The decrepit condition of Spain, despite her 
enormous American possessions, gave some color to the opinion 
that colonies were a drain on the mother country rather than a 
source of wealth. If Philip II, it could be asked, had derived so 



Motives for Colonization 425 

little benefit from the richest lands of the New World, what ad- 
vantage was there in spreading over the less coveted regions which 
she had left untenanted ? There were, however, various motives, 
political, religious, and economic, which combined to induce under- 
takers and emigrants to engage in colonial enterprise, and influ- 
enced the government to view it with favor. 

§ 2. Political Aims in Colonial Operations 

Political aims were obviously operating in the various schemes 
of plantation which were floated during the reign of James I. 
The task was undertaken in Ireland, with the hope of introducing 
some sort of stable government into that unhappy country, where 
the crown had entirely failed to establish effective authority over 
the native population. The statesmen of the day came to the con- 
clusion that the only hope of reducing the island to order lay in 
abandoning the attempt to adapt Irish institutions to the pur- 
poses of government, and in seriously attempting to create a 
new system. They came to the conclusion that this could be 
best accomplished by settling it with Englishmen, who would 
hold the land on some secure form of tenure, and would main- 
tain their own language and laws uncontaminated by contact 
with Irish neighbors. 

It was necessary to deport many septs in order to give this scheme 
a trial, and only to admit a small portion of the native population. 
Sir Arthur Chichester and Sir John Davies hoped that by promoting 
immigration they might diffuse a respect for the authority of the 
crown. in all parts of the island, and secure the presence of men 
on whose help they could rely for the various purposes of local 
government. Under James I and Charles I the settlements had 
a highly military character, as it was not merely necessary for the 
colonists to be able to hold their own against Irish raids, but also 
to be ready to defend the country, in the not improbable event of 
a Spanish invasion. From the time of Cromwell there was less 
need for fortifications and strongholds ; he subjugated the island 
so entirely that English law and language became dominant, and 
material progress on English lines seemed possible. The native 
Irish were collected in Galway, between the Shannon and an in- 
hospitable coast, where they could do little to assist the Spaniards 
or French in any attack they might make. In the early part of the 
seventeenth century, plantation was necessary as a step towards 
consolidating the political and administrative system of the British 
Isles. Immigration to Ireland was encouraged, with the object 



426 English Historians 

of improving the efficiency of government in an island that had 
long formed part of the dominions of the crown. 

Political aims were also kept in view in all the schemes for 
colonizing beyond the Atlantic. It was hoped that these planta- 
tions would tend to restrict the overweening power of Spain in the 
New World, and might even serve as a basis for attacking it. 
Deep-seated hostility to the Spanish type of civilization was com- 
bined in the minds of many Englishmen with dread at finding so 
much wealth and power concentrating in a single monarchy. The 
sense of antagonism to the Spanish system first awakened in the 
minds of Englishmen a consciousness of their duty and destiny 
to plant free institutions in the lands beyond the sea. Till the 
seventeenth century no serious effort had been made to Anglicize 
Ireland; Englishmen had been satisfied to live their own life in 
their own island. The discovery of America, and the develop- 
ment of maritime power under Elizabeth, had, however, provided 
an opportunity for diffusing English civilization in the New 
World. The men of the seventeenth century threw themselves 
eagerly into the task. England recognized and accepted her 
vocation. 

§ 3. The Religions Motive in Colonization 

The inner reasons for the antagonism to Spain, which had so 
much to do with shaping the colonial ambitions of Englishmen, 
were rather religious than political. The rule of the most Catholic 
majesty, with the scope it gave for the Inquisition, was abhorrent 
to Protestants. Interference in America was a defiance, of the 
authority claimed by the pope to partition out the newly dis- 
covered lands between Portugal and Spain. The planting of a 
New England across the seas was an idea that appealed strongly 
to men of a religious temperament, as well as to those who were 
moved by considerations of political expediency. Religious and 
pecuniary motives had been intimately blended in the Crusades, 
and in this respect English colonization resembled them at the 
outset. 

The plantation of Virginia was regarded by Hakluyt and some 
other men, who formed a London company with this object in 
1606, as not only a commercial but also a missionary enterprise. 
They set about their adventure in the hope that it would "here- 
after tend to the glory of his Divine Majesty, in propagating of 
Christian religion, to such people as yet live in darkness and mis- 
erable ignorance of the true knowledge and worship of God, and 



Motives for Colonization 427 

may in time bring the infidels and savages living in those parts 
to human civility, and to a settled and quiet government." The 
Company endeavored to be careful in the selection of the men 
who were to emigrate and ^o refuse "idle and wicked persons 
such as shame or fear compels into this action, and such as are the 
weeds and rankness of this land"; they issued a true and sincere 
declaration to show what settlers they would accept, both as 
regards religion and conversation, and faculties, arts, and trades. 
They also made careful provision for the maintenance of the reli- 
gious habits they prized so highly; churches were built with such 
elaboration as their means allowed, and the practice of attending 
the daily services there was carefully enforced. The whole work 
of colonization was treated as an enterprise in which it was a work 
of piety to engage, and collections were made in parish churches 
for the college that was planned, for English and Indians, at 
Henrico. The work continued despite many difficulties of every 
kind. Notwithstanding the efforts of the Company, the colony 
had been the refuge of a certain number of dissolute adventurers 
from the first ; there had been much difficulty in keeping them in 
order, and in preserving friendly relations with the natives, while 
there had been many quarrels among the officials. On the whole, 
the colony prospered more in its material life than as a missionary 
enterprise ; but it was not in a very flourishing condition at the close 
of King James' reign. 

The religious impulse was also strongly at work in the first settle- 
ment of New England, not merely as affecting the spirit in which 
the enterprise was planned, but also as affording the main motive 
of those who actually emigrated. The Pilgrim Fathers were not 
much concerned in planting the existing English type of Christian 
civilization in the New World; but they desired to secure the 
opportunity of founding a society for themselves which should 
be thoroughly scriptural in character ; they hoped that this would 
serve as a bright example to the rest of mankind. They estab- 
lished a very strict ecclesiastical discipline, but one which was 
entirely unlike the system they had found so galling in England. 
Under their scheme temporal privileges were dependent on church 
membership. "Most of the persons at New England are not 
admitted of their Church and therefore are not freemen; and 
when they come to be tried there, be it for life or limb, name or 
estate, or whatsoever, they must be tried and judged too by those 
of the Church, who are in a sort their adversaries." The enthu- 
siasts for Theocracy sought out witches and banished Antinomians ; 



428 English Historians 

they even expelled and shipped off two members of the council 
who were in favor of using the Prayer Book. 

In a community of men of this type there was much intense in- 
dividual earnestness, but little sense of corporate duty to their 
neighbors, except in the way of furnishing them with a model to 
copy. Though they had traded with the Indians, they had made 
no serious efforts to civilize them, and had been careful to keep 
them at arm's length. The war of extermination, waged against 
the Pequod nation, alarmed all the neighboring tribes ; and some 
of the colonies found it wise, in 1643, f° r their own security, to con- 
solidate themselves into "The United Colonies of New England." 
Massachusetts, Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven were the 
first members of this union. It was the beginning of that federa- 
tion which has proved such a convenient system for governing a 
growing nation. Both in the nature of the impulse which gave 
them birth, and in the character of the settlements themselves, 
there is a marked contrast between the history of the Northern and 
Southern colonies on the American coast. 

Religious convictions of different kinds exercised a considerable 
influence in connection with the planting of other English settle- 
ments in North America. Maryland was taken in hand by Sir 
George Calvert, a Romanist, in 1632; through the personal con- 
nections of the proprietor, this territory became the resort of such 
of his co-religionists as emigrated. It was a district where English 
Romanists obtained toleration, till the aggressive action of the 
Jesuits called forth the inevitable reaction. Liberty of conscience 
was adopted, as a matter of conviction, by Roger Williams at 
Rhode Island, the settlement which he founded in 1636, after he 
had been obliged to withdraw from New England, and a similar 
course was pursued by the Quakers in West New Jersey and Penn- 
sylvania. No serious effort was made to enforce religious uni- 
formity after the Restoration, and the principle of civil toleration 
was formulated, on grounds of expediency, in the Constitutions 
which Locke drew up for Carolina. He hoped that peace might 
be maintained among the diversity of opinions, "and that Jews, 
heathen and other dissenters from the Christian religion might not 
be scared away from the new colony." When the Puritan The- 
ocracy succumbed before the storm which was raised by the trials 
of witches in New England, there was no longer any effective 
obstacle to the diffusion of Whig principles in regard to religious 
liberty. They found a congenial soil, and have so deeply impreg- 
nated American life and thought that there is some excuse for the 



Motives for Colonization 429 

mistake of regarding them as an original element in its compo- 
sition. 

§ 4. Colonies as Sources of Gain 

Religious motives had much to do in shaping the character of 
particular settlements, but the main impulse in the work of colo- 
nization was economic. The plantations offered a field for the 
profitable investment of capital. While many of the London 
merchants were eager to establish themselves on English soil, 
others were ready to develop colonial resources, and to promote the 
cultivation of products, such as tobacco and sugar, which were 
in demand in European lands. The development of the Southern 
colonies and the West Indian Islands was promoted by moneyed 
men in England, who directed the energies of the planters into 
raising commodities for export. These traders were not specially 
concerned to foster communities which should be self-sufficing ; 
they preferred that the planters should manage their estates with 
a view to the requirements of outside markets. As a consequence, 
there was little subsistence farming in these regions. The land 
was mostly held in large estates by men who carried on their busi- 
ness, either with their own capital or through the help of the credit 
extended to them by the merchants who were interested in the 
trade. The course which these London capitalists pursued did 
not always commend itself to the government; King James, 
while he sympathized with their enterprise, was somewhat afraid 
of pushing it too vigorously, and involving himself in a dispute 
with Spain. Charles I was eager for the prosperity of Virginia, 
and was anxious that the colony should at least provide its own 
food supply; he feared that the future of the territory was being 
sacrificed to the immediate gain of the planters. It was clear, 
however, that the development of these settlements was of advan- 
tage to the realm, and successive commissions gave careful atten- 
tion to their affairs. For one thing, the plantations served to 
supplement the resources of the realm, and to furnish supplies of 
commodities which had hitherto been procured from abroad, so as 
to diminish the commercial indebtedness of the country and to 
influence the balance of trade in our favor. Again, the trade with 
the colonies opened up a field for the employment of our shipping ; 
and efforts were made, both by the crown and Parliament, to 
restrict this newly established line of intercourse to English vessels, 
in the interest of the maritime power of the country. After the 



430 English Historians 

Restoration, when the plantations were firmly established, a third 
economic advantage to the mother country came more and more 
clearly into view. The colonists demanded considerable quan- 
tities of European goods, and the progress of the settlements opened 
a larger market, the advantage of which English manufacturers 
endeavored to retain for themselves. On these various grounds 
English moneyed men were inclined to promote the plantation 
of new areas, and the English governments were ready to approve 
of the undertaking. 

§ 5. Colonies as Homes for Englishmen 

There must also have been a very large class who looked eagerly 
to the plantations in the hope of finding a sphere where they could 
engage, as independent men, in rural occupations. They may 
have had little capital of their own, but they were confident that 
if they obtained a start, they could make a living by their labor. 
There is reason to believe that the material prosperity, and the 
comparative peace, which England enjoyed during the Elizabethan 
and Jacobean periods, had resulted in a considerable increase 
of population. The growth of trade afforded openings for her 
younger sons of country gentlemen; but there must have been a 
large number of young men who greatly preferred an outdoor life, 
and who had difficulty in raising the premium that was required 
in order to be apprenticed to any branch of commerce. The fact 
that the competition for farms was so keen, is an incidental proof 
that there were a number of men who desired to follow this avo- 
cation; and if they had no opportunity at home, they would be 
ready to look for one abroad. Such men would be prepared to 
devote their own labor to the arduous work of clearing and tilling 
the ground for a livelihood ; they desired to have a holding which 
they could work on their own account. Those plantations, which 
did not raise suitable products for export, offered a poor prospect 
of profit to the capitalists, but they would attract the classes of the 
community who were prepared to engage in farming for subsist- 
ence. It was almost inevitable that the colonies which were 
suitable for the growth of cereals should be settled with small 
homesteads, and not with large plantations managed by men who 
were catering for distant markets. 

There have been many periods of English history when the 
government would have looked askance on schemes for drawing off 
large numbers of adult men to distant countries, where they could 



Motives for Colonization 431 

not be called upon to play a personal part in defending England 
against invaders. More pressing anxiety was felt in the seven- 
teenth century as to the best means of utilizing the able-bodied 
population in times of peace ; and the government was quite pre- 
pared to give active assistance in promoting emigration. The 
statute of 1563 had doubtless done much to bring about the ab- 
sorption of vagrants in industrial pursuits; but, despite the excel- 
lence of the London system for dealing with the poor, there appears 
to have been a considerable body of the unemployed in the city 
during the earlier part of the reign of James I. .Among the motives 
and reasons which the king urged with the view of inducing the 
city to promote the Ulster Plantations it was pointed out that, 
if a body of the inhabitants were to hive off from London to Derry, 
the evils of overcrowding would be reduced, and there would 
neither be the same risk of infection nor as great a pressure of com- 
petition. The city was not easily induced to take active steps in 
response to the invitation. In the subsequent story we hear more 
of the king's endeavors to obtain contributions in money than of 
any great success in securing emigrants from London. 

The city merchants were much more keenly alive to the advantage 
of developing trade, by planting in Virginia, than to the wisdom 
of schemes for prosecuting subsistence farming in the north of 
Ireland. The colonists, who were managing large estates and 
raising tobacco for export, were in constant need of labor; the 
Virginia Company and, after its dissolution, the agents of the 
planters, were willing to pay a good price for servants of every 
class; a large business sprang up, both at London and Bristol, 
in the shipment of laborers to the plantations. 

There can be no doubt that a preference would be given to per- 
sons who had been brought up in the country and were accustomed 
to out-of-door employment. The young and active men in any 
parish, who saw little prospect of getting a holding of their own, 
would possibly feel that they could better themselves.by emigration, 
though it is not probable that many adult servants in husbandry 
had either the inclination or the opportunity to go so far afield. 
There was more chance of drawing on the surplus population of 
the towns, and on those artisans who were thrown out of work 
by the fluctuations of their trade. It has already been pointed 
out that the arrangements which were made for the relief of the 
poor, prove how very easily the well-doing and industrious persons 
of this class might be reduced to destitution; the rigidity of the 
Elizabethan system, which told alike against change of residence 



432 English Historians 

and change of occupation, must have put great obstacles in the 
way of any man obtaining employment when once he was thrown 
out. Recruits could also be obtained from less desirable elements 
of the population, as there was a constant desire on the part of the 
judges and the government to mitigate the severity of our penal 
code, and to inflict sentences of transportation in many cases 
where the penalty of death had been incurred. The colonists did 
their best to protect themselves against the intrusion of criminal 
elements, as the Virginia Company had done in its day. They 
insisted that each emigrant should be provided with a guarantee 
of character and respectability; but these regulations could not 
be maintained in the face of the great demand for. labor. 

§ 6. Transportation of Irish and Servants 

The openings afforded by the colonies must have done much to 
relieve the country from the after-effects of the disturbances caused 
by the Civil War. It is in the case of Ireland that we get the fullest 
evidence; Cromwell's campaign was ruthless enough; and those 
of the garrison at Drogheda, who escaped with their lives, were 
transported to the Barbadoes. The scheme in which Parliament 
then engaged, for the wholesale planting of Ireland by Cromwell's 
soldiers, was an ingenious endeavor to get rid at once of a political 
danger and of the arrears of pay. It could not be carried out, 
however, until a wholesale deportation of the existing population 
had been effected, and numbers of them seem to have been com- 
pulsory immigrants to the plantations. Similar measures were 
taken with regard to the Royalist prisoners after the battle of 
Worcester, and the possibility of getting rid of restive or danger- 
ous elements in the population must have contributed immensely 
to the establishment of civil order once more. 

When the supply of prisoners and conquered persons fell off, 
however, there were no legitimate means of keeping up the stream 
of immigration or meeting the requirements of the planters, and a 
systematic practice of kidnapping sprang up, by 'which large num- 
bers of persons were spirited away to work as servants in the colo- 
nies. The extent to which this shameful traffic was carried on is 
very remarkable, and interesting evidence about it is afforded by 
the mention of occasional and unsuccessful attempts to put it 
down. In 1660 John Clarke petitioned for letters patent em- 
powering him to keep a register office, to which all servants and 
children might be brought before being transported to Virginia 



Motives for Colonization 433 

and the Barbadoes, so as to prevent the abuses of forcible trans- 
portation of persons without their own or their parents' consent. 
A similar proposal was made in 1664, and the complaints of mer- 
chants, planters, and masters of ships, as well as of the Lord Mayor 
and Aldermen of London, show how greatly some such institution 
was required. 



2F 



CHAPTER II 

DRAKE AND THE CIRCUMNAVIGATION 

Among the many Elizabethan sailors whose daring exploits 
initiated the British struggle for world trade and dominion there 
is none more famous than Sir Francis Drake. As a Protestant 
seaman, he added religious zeal to his enthusiasm for the plun- 
der of Spanish commerce. In a time when the contest for oceanic 
traffic took the form of ill-disguised warfare, Drake showed him- 
self master of the art of sailing, fighting, and freebooting. He 
made many bold and successful expeditions, but one of them stands 
out above all others on account of its uniqueness and daring. 
That is his voyage around the world, on which he set out in 1577. 
The story of this journey is told in Mr. Corbett's little volume 
on Drake from which is taken the following extract relating a part 
of the tale after the rounding of South America. 

§ 1. Raiding Spanish Shipping 1 

Lord Burleigh's scheme had failed, and Drake was knocking 
at the golden gates. In the teeth of the astutest ministers of the 
time, he was about to blow the blast before which the giant's doors 
would fly open, and deliberately to goad the giant into open fight. 
Full of the momentous meaning of his resolve, he paused upon the 
threshold to do honor to the mistress whose favor he wore. Be- 
fore the frowning entry he caused his fleet, in homage of their 
sovereign lady, to strike their topsails upon the bunt as a token 
of his willingness and glad mind, and to show his dutiful obedience 
to her Highness. It was a piece of true Elizabethan chivalry, and 
like a true Elizabethan knight he accompanied it with a shrewd 
stroke of policy. Sir Christopher Hatton had now no visible 

1 Corbett, Drake, chap. vi. By permission of Julian Corbett, Esq., and 
The Macmillan Company, Publishers. 

434 



Drake and the Circumnavigation 435 

connection with the venture. The vessel named after him had 
been broken up, and his representative had been beheaded. 
Drake knew well how flat fell prowess at the Faery Queene's court 
if a man had not a friend at her ear. He knew, too, that no repu- 
tation was so fashionable just then as that of a patron of discoveries, 
nor could he be ignorant that all the new favorite's good-will 
would be required to save him from Burleigh's power. So on the 
poop of the little flagship was placed the crest of the Captain of 
the Guard, and in his honor the Pelican became the Golden Hind. 
So protected, Drake boldly entered the straits. Then from the 
towering snow-cones and threatening glaciers that guarded the en- 
try the tempests swept down upon the daring intruders. Out of the 
tortuous gulfs that through the bowels of the fabulous Austral 
continent seemed to lead beyond the confines of the world, rude 
squalls buffeted them this way and that, and currents, the like 
of which no man had seen, made as though they would dash them 
to pieces in the fathomless depths where no cable would reach. 
Fires lit by natives on the desolate shores as the strangers strug- 
gled by, added the terrors of unknown magic. But Drake's 
fortitude and consummate seamanship triumphed over all, and 
in a fortnight he brought his ill-sailing ships in triumph out upon 
the Pacific. Then, as though maddened to see how the adven- 
turers had braved every effort to destroy them, the whole fury 
of the fiends that guarded the South Sea's slumber rushed howling 
upon them. Hardly had the squadron turned northward than 
a terrific gale struck it and hurled it back. The sky was darkened, 
and the bowels of the earth seemed to have burst, and for nearly 
two months they were driven under bare poles to and fro without 
rest, in latitudes where no ship had ever sailed. On the maps 
the great Austral continent was marked, but they found in its 
place an enchanted void, where wind and water, and ice and 
darkness, seemed to make incessant war. After three weeks' 
strife, the Mary gold went down with all hands ; and in another 
week Wynter lost heart, and finding himself at the mouth of the 
Straits, went home in despair; while the Golden Hind, ignorant 
of the desertion, was swept once more to the south of Cape Horn. 
Here, on the fifty-third day of its fury, the storm ceased, exhausted, 
and Drake found himself alone. But it was no moment to repine, 
for he knew he had made a discovery so brilliant as to deprive 
even Magellan's of its radiance. He was anchored among the 
islands southward of anything known to geographers, and before 
him the Atlantic and Pacific rolled together in one great flood. 



436 English Historians 

In his exultation he landed on the farthest island, and walking 
alone with his instruments to its end, he laid himself down, and 
with his arms embraced the southernmost point of the known 
world. . . . 

About a month later, little dreaming what had taken place, the 
crew of the Grand Captain of the South were lazily waiting in 
Valparaiso harbor for a wind to carry them to Panama with their 
cargo of gold and Chili wine. As they lounged over the bulwarks 
a sail appeared to the northward, and they made ready a pipe of 
wine to have a merry night with the newcomers. As the stranger 
anchored they beat her a welcome of their drum, and then watched 
her boat come alongside. In a moment all was in confusion. 
A rough old salt was laying about him with his fists, shouting in 
broken Spanish, "Down, dog, down!" and the astounded Span- 
iards were soon tight under hatches. It was Tom Moone 
at his old work. Hither the Golden Hind had been piloted by 
a friendly Indian in its search for provisions and loot. The little 
settlement was quickly plundered of all it had worth taking, and 
Drake's mariners, who for months had been living on salted pen- 
guin, and many of whom were suffering from wounds received in 
an encounter with the islanders of Mocha, were revelling in all 
the dainties of the Chilian paradise. For three days the mysteri- 
ous ship, which seemed to have dropped from the skies, lay in 
the harbor collecting provisions, and then, laden with victuals, it 
sailed away northward with its prize. 

Drake's great anxiety now was to rendezvous his scattered fleet 
for the sack of Lima and Panama, and assured that Wynter must 
be ahead he fully expected to find him in 30 ° north latitude, the 
point agreed on. After an ineffectual attempt to water at Co- 
quimbo, where he found the Spaniards in arms, he discovered a 
natural harbor a little north of it which suited his purpose. In a 
month his preparations were complete. The men were thoroughly 
refreshed ; a pinnace had been set up ; the Golden Hind refitted 
from stem to stern, and under the guidance of the pilot of the Grand 
Captain he set out to realize the dream of his life. Every one 
except perhaps poor John Doughty was in the highest spirits. 
The return of health and the glorious climate made them reckless 
of the dangers of their single-handed attempt. Still they trusted 
to find the Elizabeth, and as they searched the coast for water 
with the pinnace they never lost hope of hearing of her. Fresh 
plunder constantly compensated for their continued disappoint- 
ment. At one point on the coast of Tarapaca they found a Span- 



Drake and the Circumnavigation 437 

iard asleep with thirteen bars of silver beside him. They apolo- 
gized profusely for disturbing his nap, and politely insisted on 
making amends by relieving him of his burden. Farther on they 
met another driving a train of guanacoes laden with some eight 
hundred pounds of silver, and expressing themselves shocked to 
see a gentleman turned carrier they took his place ; but somehow, 
as they afterwards said, they lost the way to his house and found 
themselves suddenly just where they had left the pinnace. 

So they romped along that peaceful coast, startling its luxurious 
slumbers with shouts of reckless laughter till they came to Arica, 
the frontier town of Peru and the point where the fabulous wealth 
of the Potosi mines was embarked for Panama. It was a place 
important enough to have tempted the Elizabeth from her tryst. 
But not only was no trace of her to be found, but so hot was the 
alarm in front of Drake that two small treasure-barks were all 
there was in the harbor to plunder and the town was in arms. 
A few hours ago a galleon had escaped northward, laden with 
eight hundred bars of silver, all belonging to the king of Spain, 
and fuming to so narrowly miss his revenge, Drake at once resolved 
to give chase. Without further care for his consort or any attempt 
on the town he hurried on with his pinnace and the Valparaiso 
prize, till at Chuli, the port of Arequipa, they saw the chase at 
anchor. Her capture was without a blow, for not a man was 
found aboard her — nor a bar of silver either. Two hours ago 
the whole of it had been heaved overboard to save it from Drake's 
hands, and in a fury of disappointment he at once set both the slow- 
sailing prizes adrift out into the ocean. For he was resolved 
by a dash on Lima to outstrip his notoriety at all costs, and so once 
more the Golden Hind and its pinnace spread their wings north- 
ward alone. 

It was on February 15 that, in the dead of night, they quietly 
entered Callao de Lima. The harbor was full of shipping, and 
the pilot whom Drake had seized from a vessel outside was made 
to take him right in among them. A ship from Panama was enter- 
ing at the same time, and as they anchored side by side, a custom- 
house boat at once put off and hailed them. Not content to wait 
till the morning, a sleepy officer boarded the Golden Hind, and 
before he knew where he was he tumbled right on the top of a big 
gun. Frightened to death, he was over the side again in a moment, 
and his boat dashed away crying the alarm. The ship of Panama 
cut her cables, and Drake slipped into the pinnace to take her, 
but as she showed fight he left her for the present and turned to 



438 English Historians 

ransack the defenceless shipping that lay around him. From 
ship to ship he went, but not an ounce of treasure could he find. 
It was all ashore except a vast quantity which had recently been 
shipped for Panama in a large vessel called Our Lady of the Con- 
ception, and nicknamed the Spitfire. That was enough for him. 
He returned to the Golden Hind, left his anchorage, and as he 
drifted out in the calm which had fallen, he captured the ship 
of Panama. But then ensued a delay both exasperating and dan- 
gerous. For three days there was not a breath of wind, and the 
Viceroy of Peru, marching down from Lima with two thousand 
troops, sent out four vessels to capture or burn the rover as he lay 
becalmed. All was in vain. Ere they found heart to close with 
the terrible stranger the breeze sprang up and away he went in 
hot pursuit of the treasure-ship. It had fourteen clays' start of 
him, but he did not despair, and while the Viceroy was solemnly 
casting guns to arm vessels to pursue him, Drake was ransacking 
ship after ship for treasure and news of the chase. She had stopped 
at Truxillo to load more bullion, and each prize told him he was 
overhauling her. At Paita he learned she had sailed but two 
days before. The scent was now hot indeed. Exasperated to 
miss his prey so narrowly, the admiral promised a golden chain 
to the man who first sighted her, and swore she should be his, 
though he tore her from her moorings at Panama itself. Across 
the line they raced and still no sight of her, till on March 1 off 
Cape San Francisco young John Drake, his page and nephew, 
claimed the reward. Fearful of alarming his quarry, Drake at 
once ordered casks to be trailed astern, and so managed to keep 
hull down till nightfall. Then the Golden Hind was slipped, and 
in one bound rushed alongside her prey. A single shot brought 
her to reason, and then side by side the two ships ran westwards 
for three days into the silent wastes of the Pacific. For three days 
more they lay together, and when they parted there were added 
to Drake's treasure thirteen chests of pieces of eight, eighty pounds' 
weight of gold, jewels untold, and the Golden Hind was literally 
ballasted with silver. 

So huge was the booty that the only thought was home. To 
attempt Panama single-handed would in any case have been mad- 
ness, and Drake resolved to return, but not by the way he came. 
The great discoveries he had already made did not satisfy his 
greed for renown. He had swept one whole continent from the 
globe ; by his survey of the coast of Chili he had for the first time 
determined the shape of another ; and now he was minded to settle 






Drake and the Circumnavigation 439 

forever the question of the North West passage. From the 
Atlantic his rivals were seeking the fabulous Strait of Anian, and 
by that channel, if it existed, he determined to find his way home. 
His daring resolve completely outwitted the Spaniards. The 
Viceroy of Peru sent his most brilliant officer, Don Pedro Sar- 
miente de Gamboa, in pursuit. He sought the rover towards 
Panama, but he was not there. Still ignorant that it was not the 
only passage between the two oceans, he turned to bar the way 
at the Straits of Magellan, and Drake was not there. But far 
away, in his palace at Mexico, Don Martin Enriquez, the per- 
jured Viceroy who eleven years ago had broken his word at Vera 
Cruz, had news in plenty. Mocking greetings from his unknown 
enemy disturbed his ease, and he had to read news from the Nicara- 
guan coast that sorted ill with a quiet siesta. There a corsair, 
the like of whom no man had seen, had been at work. His 
prisoners had found him surrounded by a council of the younger 
sons of the first men in England, who always approached him 
hat in hand and stood in his presence. He dined in state to the 
sound of violins, and his crew, whose discipline filled the Spaniards 
with amazement, adored him. He was a martinet, and took no 
man's advice, but he heard all alike and had no favorite. He had 
artificers of every kind, and at the Isle of Cano had just careened 
and refitted his ship, God and his saints only knew for what fresh 
depredations. He had cartographers who were making charts 
of the coast as he went, so that whole fleets might follow in his 
track. And as for catching him, so well armed and so fast was 
his ship that that was out of the question. The whole coast of 
New Spain was in a fever of alarm, for they knew it was the same 
Drake, the cousin of Aquinez, who five years ago had raided 
Nombre de Dios. The Bishop of Guatemala began melting his 
chimes into guns, ships were fitted out, and troops moved up and 
down. In a month they expected to be ready to take the sea, 
but in a week Drake had done his work. Swooping on the port 
of Guatulco, he had found the court sitting, carried off all the judges 
bodily to his ship, and then made them send an order for every 
man to leave the town. This done,' he revictualled at his ease 
from the Spanish storehouses, and next day he was away once 
more. He had less idea of staying than ever; for, lurking off 
the coast of Nicaragua, on the track of the China trade, he had 
made a capture of greater value than all his treasures. It was 
a vessel on which were sailing two China pilots, and now snug 
in the cabin of Spain's arch-enemy were the whole of the secret 



44-0 English Historians 

charts by which was conducted the rich Spanish trade across the 
Pacific. 

§ 2. The Northern Voyage 

For Spain it was a disaster of which no man could see the end, 
and, hugging his inestimable treasures, Drake sped northward 
to find his way back into the Atlantic. By the first week in June 
he had reached close-hauled on the northeast trade as high as 
the latitude of Cape Mendocino ; but here he was suddenly caught 
in a storm of extraordinary severity. His rigging was frozen, his 
crew were half -paralyzed. Still he struggled on, firing his men 
with his own hot courage. In two days more he reached the lati- 
tude of Vancouver, and there he gave up the struggle. The land 
still trended westward, the weather grew more and more severe, 
and he made up his mind that if the passage existed it was imprac- 
ticable. So the great resolve was taken, and running south to 
find a port to prepare the Golden Hind for her tremendous effort, 
he put into a natural harbor near San Francisco, where the cliffs 
were white like those at home, and the soil was teeming with gold. 
As fort and dockyard rose by their lonely shores, the Indians 
gathered in wonder and would have worshipped the strangers as 
beings from a better land. The horrified Puritans protested as 
kindly as they might, and when persuaded Drake was human, 
the simple savages crowned him in his mistress's name king of 
New Albion. So at least the old navigators understood the strange 
ceremonies with which the month of their stay was occupied ; and 
the loud lamentations of their friends when they departed filled 
their imaginations with visions of an empire of Englishmen hardly 
less grand than the great reality. 

§ 3. Across the Pacific 

It was on July 25 that, with a boldness we can hardly realize, 
the course was laid direct for the Moluccas. Their instruments 
for finding latitude were far from perfect ; longitude it was prac- 
tically impossible for them to determine at all; their logs were 
so distrusted that as a rule they preferred to guess the runs; and 
the variation of the compass was ascertained with childish crude- 
ness. Yet Drake did not even condescend to follow the beaten 
trade-track of the Spaniards along the ninth parallel. But straight 
across the Pacific, from where he was to where he wished to be, 
he pushed his way as it were by inspiration. For sixty-eight days 



Drake and the Circumnavigation 441 

they had no sight of land. By the end of September they found 
themselves close to the equator, and turning to the northward to 
avoid the counter-current, on the last day of the month they ran 
in amongst the Carolines. 

The rest is long to tell : how, getting clear of the pilfering natives, 
Drake made the Philippines, and coasting along them ran from 
the southern point of Mindanao through theTalautse group and 
past Togolando to the Moluccas; how at Ternate he made an 
exclusive commercial treaty with the king which, for a century 
afterwards, was the sheet-anchor of our diplomatists in their quar- 
rels with the Dutch and Portuguese about the East Indian trade ; 
how he careened again at an island near the Greyhound Strait, 
and then, after trying to beat northward into the Macassar channel, 
turned back to pass southward, and was at once entangled in the 
reef-encumbered seas that wash the eastern coasts of Celebes; 
and how, after escaping a thousand dangers in the first days of the 
year 1580, as they were sailing along the south of Peling Island 
with a fine topsail breeze, they ran full tilt on a reef. There for 
twenty hours they lay at the mercy of God. All around was deep 
sea, where no hold could be got for warping. Every shift was 
tried, but not an inch would the treasure-laden vessel stir, and death 
only grew more real before them. Hopeless and exhausted, they 
desisted from their efforts, and in solemn preparation for the end, 
took the sacrament together. Then in the good old Puritan fash- 
ion, to aid the Lord, Drake made jettison of guns and spices worth 
their weight in silver, till lo ! in the midst of their pious labor the 
wind changed, and, like the breath of the Saviour in answer to 
their prayers, gently slid them from the rock. It was the gravest 
danger of all their voyage, and for nearly two months more, as 
they groped their way about the Floris Sea and struggled with 
baffling gales, they hourly expected its recurrence. But every 
peril was overcome at last, and in March they were well clear 
of the Archipelago, and with thankful hearts refitting, cleaning, 
and victualling in a southern port of Java. So the great exploit 
was accomplished, and the prayer uttered so devoutly six years 
ago upon the giant tree in Darien was more than fulfilled. God 
had given his supplicant life and leave to sail the South Sea in an 
English ship, and he had sailed it from side to side. Its secret 
was England's at last; and, laden with its wealth, in two months 
more the triumphant explorer was ploughing his homeward way 
towards the Cape of Good Hope. 



44 2 English Historians 



Bibliographical Note 

Corbett, Drake and the English Navy. Payne, Elizabethan Seamen. 
Innes, England under the Tudors, chap, xxiii. Froude, The Elizabethan 
Seamen in the Sixteenth Century. Lee, Source Book of English History, 
pp. 316 ff. for contemporary accounts of Elizabethan seamen. 



CHAPTER III 

RISE OF BRITISH DOMINION IN INDIA 

The rise of British dominion in India under the management 
of a trading company has been regarded by many writers as one 
of the wonders of history; but a careful examination of the condi- 
tions in India and the steps by which British power was built up 
makes the whole process clear and simple. The rich trade of 
the East which first attracted British merchants was older than 
the time of Alexander the Great, but it was not until 1498 that the 
Portuguese under Vasco da Gama found a water route around 
Africa to India. For almost one hundred years the Portuguese 
enjoyed the immense profits of this commerce, but in 1591 the 
English sent an expedition to trade on their own account. Four 
years later Dutch merchants despatched their first expedition and 
the three powers soon entered into a heated rivalry for trading 
advantages. In this bitter contest, the Portuguese were van- 
quished, the Dutch triumphed in the Spice Islands, and the Eng- 
glish confined their enterprises largely to the mainland of India. 
In 1667 the French joined in the race for Eastern markets and by 
the opening of the eighteenth century had secured several important 
posts in India. This trade rivalry was shortly transformed into 
a contest for dominion, and to understand this one must examine 
the local situation in India. 

When the English first went to India, that country was ruled 
by a mighty Mohammedan Moghul, whose ancestors had conquered 
the native population and founded a great empire. As long as 
powerful Moghuls succeeded one another, the European traders 
were secure in their operation, and the possibilities of conquest 
were slight. However, in 1707, the last of the great Moghuls, 
Aurangzeb, died and his dominions began to go to pieces under 

443 



444 English Historians 

the weak rule of his successors. Shortly the English and French 
opened a contest for the dismemberment of the ancient empire in 
which the latter were overthrown during the Seven Years' War. 
Finally, the English were compelled to war with the native and 
Mohammedan princes, and step by step they wrested from them 
the fragments of the disintegrating empire. This whole story is 
told in a clear and readable fashion by Sir Alfred Lyall, in his Rise 
of British Dominion in India. 

§ i. Two Periods in the Growth of British Power 1 

The rise and territorial expansion of the English power may 
be conveniently divided into two periods, which slightly overlap 
each other, but on the whole mark two distinct and consecutive 
stages in the construction of our dominion. The first is the period 
when the contest lay among the European nations, who began by 
competing for commercial advantages, and ended by fighting 
for political superiority on the Indian littoral. The commercial 
competition was going on throughout the whole of the seventeenth 
century; but the struggle with the French, which laid the founda- 
tion of our dominion, lasted less than twenty years, for it began 
in 1745, and was virtually decided in 1763. 

The second period upon which we are now about to enter is 
that during which England was contending with the native Indian 
powers, not for commercial preponderance or for strips of territory 
and spheres of influence along the seaboard, but for supremacy 
over all India. Reckoning the beginning of this contest from 
1756, when Clive and Admiral Watson sailed from Madras to 
recover Calcutta from the Nawab of Bengal, it may be taken to 
have been substantially determined in fifty years ; although for an- 
other fifty years the expansion of our territory went on by great 
strides, with long halts intervening, until the natural limits of 
India were attained by the conquest of Sinde and the Punjab. 

§ 2. Explanation of the Easy Conquest of India 

The first thing that must strike the ordinary observer on looking 
back over the hundred years from 1757 to 1857, during which the 

1 Lyall, The Rise of British Dominion in India, pp. 98 ff. By permis- 
sion of Charles Scribner's Sons, Publishers. 



Rise of British Dominion in India 445 

acquisition of our Indian dominion has been accomplished, is 
the magnitude of the exploit ; the next is the remarkable ease with 
which it was achieved. At the present moment, when the English 
survey from their small island in the West the immense Eastern 
empire that has grown up out of their petty trading settlements 
on the Indian seaboard, they are apt to be struck with wonder and 
a kind of dismay at the prospering of their own handiwork. The 
thing is, as has been said, so unprecedented in history, and par- 
ticularly it is so entirely unfamiliar to modern political ideas, — 
we have become so unaccustomed in the Western world to build 
up empires in the high Roman fashion, — that even those who 
have studied the beginnings of our Indian dominion are inclined 
to treat the outcome and climax as something passing man's under- 
standing. Our magnificent possessions are commonly regarded 
as a man might look at a great prize he had drawn by luck in a 
lottery; they are supposed to have been won by incalculable 
chance. 

But it may be fairly argued that this view, which embodies the 
general impression on this subject, can be controverted by known 
facts. The idea that India might be easily conquered and gov- 
erned, with a very small force, by a race superior in warlike capac- 
ity or in civilization, was no novelty at all. In the first place, 
the thing had actually been done once already. The Emperor 
Baber, who invaded India from central Asia in the sixteenth 
century, has left us his authentic memoirs; it is a book of great 
historical interest, and nothing more amusing has ever been writ- 
ten by an Asiatic. He says : "When I invaded the country for the 
fifth time, overthrew Sultan Ibrahim, and subdued the empire 
of Hindusthan, my servants, the merchants and their servants, 
and the followers of all friends that were in camp along with me, 
were numbered, and they amounted to twelve thousand men. I 
placed my foot," he writes, "in the stirrup of resolution, and my 
hands in the reins of confidence in God — and I marched against 
the possessions of the throne of Delhi and the dominions of Hin- 
dusthan whose army was said to amount to one hundred thou- 
sand foot, with more than one thousand elephants. The Most 
High God," he adds, "did not suffer the hardships that I had 
undergone to be thrown away, but defeated my formidable 
enemy and made me conqueror of this noble country." 

This was done in 1526; Baber's victory at Paniput gave him 
the mastery of all northern India and founded the Moghul empire. 
He had really accomplished the enterprise with smaller means and 



446 English Historians 

resources than those possessed by the English when they had fixed 
themselves securely in Bengal with a base on the sea ; and the great 
host which he routed at Paniput was a far more formidable army 
than the English ever encountered in India until they met the 
Sikhs. Now what had been done before could be done again, 
and was indeed likely to be done again. So when at the opening 
of the eighteenth century the Moghul empire was evidently de- 
clining towards a fall, and people were speculating upon what 
might come after it, we find floating in the minds of cool observers 
the idea that the next conquest of India might possibly be made 
by Europeans. 

§ 3. Early European Views of the Situation in India 

The keynote had indeed been struck earlier by Bernier, a French 
physician at the court of Aurangzeb, towards the close of the seven- 
teenth century, who writes in his book that M. de Conde or M. de 
Turenne with twenty thousand men could conquer all India ; and 
who in his letter to Colbert lays particular stress first on the riches, 
secondly on the weakness of Bengal. But in 1746 one Colonel 
James Mill, who had been twenty years in India, submitted to the 
Austrian Emperor a scheme for conquering Bengal as a very feasible 
and profitable undertaking. " The whole country of Hindusthan," 
he says, "or empire of the Great Moghul, is, and ever has been, 
in a state so feeble and defenceless that it is almost a miracle that 
no prince of Europe, with a maritime power at command, has not 
as yet thought of making such acquisitions there as at one stroke 
would put him and his subjects in possession of infinite wealth. . . . 
The policy of the Moghul is bad, his military worse, and as to a 
maritime power to command and protect his coasts, he has none 
at all. . . . The province of Bengal is at present under the do- 
minion of a rebel subject of the Moghul, whose annual revenue 
amounts to about two millions. But Bengal, though not to be 
reduced by the power of the Moghul, is equally indefensible with 
the rest of Hindusthan on the side of the ocean, and consequently 
may be forced out of the rebel's hand with all its wealth, which is 
incredibly vast." If we bear in mind how little could have been 
accurately known of India as a whole by an Englishman in 1746, 
we must give Colonel Mill credit for much sagacity and insight 
into the essential facts of the situation. He discerns the central 
points; he places his finger upon the elementary causes of India's 
permanent weakness, her political instability within, and her sea- 
coast exposed and undefended externally. 



Rise of British Dominion in India 447 



§ 4. The British in the Province oj Bengal 

In the year 1716 the English, whose trading factories had long 
been established in Bengal, obtained from the Moghul Emperor 
an important firman, or imperial order, permitting them to import 
and export goods upon payment of a fixed tribute, and protecting 
them from the heavy and arbitrary taxes laid on them at the caprice 
of the Nawabs. Bengal was a province under a governor whose 
ordinary title was the Nawab Nazim, who held office during the 
pleasure of the Emperor, and who was frequently changed, so long 
as the empire was in its vigor, lest he should become too strong 
for the central authority. But as the power of the Emperor de- 
clined the independence of the Nawabs increased in this distant 
province, until in the eighteenth century, when Maratha insur- 
rections and the irruptions from central Asia multiplied the dis- 
tractions of the State, the Bengal governors paid little obedience 
and less revenue to Delhi. 

Under Murshid Kuli Khan, a man of considerable ability, the 
governorship became in the usual fashion hereditary; but in 1742 
his grandson was overthrown and slain byAliverdi Khan, an Afghan 
adventurer who raised himself from a very humble post to be 
deputy-governor of Behar, and who won for himself by the sword 
the rulership of Bengal. During the fourteen years of his strong 
administration the foreign merchants had no great reason to com- 
plain; for although he levied large subsidies from the English, 
French, and Dutch factories, he gave them protection and enforced 
good order, suppressing all quarrels and tolerating no encroach- 
ments. On his death, in 1756, he was succeeded by his adopted 
son, known in English histories as Suraj-ud-daulah, a young man, 
whose savage and suspicious temper was controlled by no experience 
or natural capacity for rulership, and who had long been jealous 
of the English, whom he suspected of having corresponded with 
a possible rival against him for the succession. 

§ 5. The Black Hole of Calcutta 

The new Nawab had just been proclaimed when letters reached 
Calcutta from England informing the president that as war with 
France was expected he should put his settlement in a state of 
defence, whereupon he began to strengthen the fortifications. 
But the right to fortify their places had not been conceded to the 



448 English Historians 

English in Bengal; and the Nawab, to whom some offence had 
previously been given by the abrupt dismissal of a messenger, 
sternly ordered them at once to desist. The English president, 
Drake, not understanding his danger, answered by explaining 
that his fortifications were against the French, who had disregarded 
the neutrality of the Moghul's dominions in the last war by taking 
Madras, and who might this time attack Calcutta. This reply 
Suraj-ud-daulah took to mean that his protection and sovereign 
authority were very lightly regarded by the foreigners. In great 
indignation he seized the factory at Kasimbazar, near his capital, 
and marched with a large army upon Calcutta. The English 
defended themselves for a time ; but the town was open, the gov- 
ernor and many of the English fled in ships down the river, and 
the rest surrendered on promise of honorable treatment. Yet 
those whom the Nawab captured with the fort were thrown into 
a kind of prison-room called the Black Hole, from which, after 
one night's dreadful suffering, only twenty-three out of one hun- 
dred and forty-six emerged alive. 

§ 6. Clive and the Battle of Plassey 

As soon as the news of this dismal catastrophe reached Madras, 
the president lost no time in despatching the fleet, commanded by 
Admiral Watson, to Bengal, with troops under Colonel Clive. 
The force was calculated to be sufficient not only for retaking 
Calcutta, but also for reducing Hooghly, expelling the French 
from Chandernagore,-and even for attempting the Nawab 's capi- 
tal at Murshidabad; and Clive set out, as he wrote, "with the full 
intention of settling the Company's estate in those parts in a better 
and more lasting condition than ever." He had less reason, he 
added, to apprehend a check from the Nawab 's army than from 
the country and the climate. Nor indeed does it appear that any 
serious misgivings as to the result of the expedition troubled the 
government at Madras, where they were only anxious to get the 
business done in Bengal before the French armament under Lally 
should arrive on the Coromandel coast. Clive lost no time in 
driving the enemy's garrison out of Calcutta ; and when the Nawab 
himself marched down to encounter him, an indecisive engage- 
ment took place, followed by a truce which was very soon broken. 
Watson and Clive carried by assault the intrenched station of the 
French at Chandernagore ; but the Nawab, who at first acquiesced, 
at the last moment withdrew his consent to the attack, and he was 



Rise of British Dominion in India 449 

secretly inviting Bussy to march from Hyderabad to his relief. 
There could be no reasonable doubt that Suraj-ud-daulah would 
renew hostilities on the first opportunity, while on the other hand, 
Lally's expedition must soon reach the eastern coast, and the 
Madras government was urgently pressing for the return of the 
troops. 

The English in Bengal thus found themselves in a perilous 
dilemma, since the troops could not return to Madras until Cal- 
cutta had been in some way placed beyond danger from the Nawab. 
When, therefore, overtures were received from certain disaffected 
chiefs of the Nawab 's court, Clive entered into a compact to de- 
throne Suraj-ud-daulah, and to set up in his stead Meer Jafir, 
one of the principal conspirators. He then marched up the coun- 
try against the Nawab, whom he found intrenched at Plassey 
with about fifteen thousand cavalry, thirty thousand foot, and 
forty pieces of cannon. The engagement began with some can- 
nonading, in which a battery managed by Frenchmen gave much 
annoyance to the English. But as soon as the French had been 
dislodged and some rising ground occupied that commanded the 
interior of the enemy's fortified camp, Clive delivered his assault 
at one angle; whereupon the Nawab fled, and his whole army 
dispersed in a general rout, leaving on the field its camp equipage, 
its artillery, and about five hundred men. Clive's despatch re- 
ports the loss on his side to have been twenty-two killed and fifty 
wounded. Next morning Meer Jafir, who had merely hovered 
about the flanks of the engagement with a large body of cavalry, 
paid a visit to Clive, was saluted as Nawab, and hastened to occupy 
the capital, Murshidabad, where he soon after put to death Suraj- 
ud-daulah. The whole province quietly submitted to the new 
ruler; the Emperor's government at Delhi, which was just then 
occupied by Ahmed Shah with an Afghan army, was totally in- 
capable of interference, so that by this sudden and violent revo- 
lution the English ascendency became at once established in Bengal. 

§ 7. The Native Armies of the Period 

The rout of Plassey — for it can hardly be called a battle — 
is in itself chiefly remarkable as the first important occasion upon 
which the East India Company's troops were openly arrayed, 
not as auxiliaries, but as principals against a considerable native 
army commanded in person by the ruler of a great province. It 
stands, in fact, first on the long list of regular actions that have 

2G 



450 English Historians 

been fought between the English in India and the chiefs or mili- 
tary leaders of the country. The event supplies, therefore, a 
very striking illustration of the radical weakness of those native 
governments and armies to whom the English found themselves 
opposed in the middle of the eighteenth century. This inherent 
feebleness of our adversaries, the inability to govern or defend 
their possessions, obviously explains why the English, who could 
do both, so rapidly made room for themselves in a country which, 
though rich and populous, was in a practical sense masterless. 
It must also be remembered that Bengal and the other provinces 
bordering on the sea in which the English won these facile triumphs 
were far more defenceless than the inland country, partly through 
the dilapidation of the central power, partly because the people 
of those tracts are naturally less warlike than elsewhere, and 
partly by the accident that they were just then very ill-governed. 
The army of the later Moghul emperors had always been bad; 
yet until Aurangzeb died it was quite strong enough to repulse 
any small expeditionary force descending upon the coast. Nor 
could such a stroke as Clive's at Plassey have been attempted with 
impunity if Bengal had happened to possess a vigorous and capa- 
ble viceroy; for a few years later our first campaigns against Hyder 
Ali in the south and the Marathas in the west showed us that under 
competent leadership the superior numbers of an Indian army 
might make it a very dangerous antagonist. 

We have to understand, then, that our earliest victories were 
over troops that were little better than a rabble of hired soldiers, 
without coherence or loyalty. An Indian army of that period 
was usually an agglomeration of mercenaries collected by the cap- 
tains of companies who supplied men to any one able to pay for 
them, having enlisted them at random out of the swarm of roving 
free-lances and swordsmen, chiefly Asiatic foreigners, by whom 
all India was infested. These bands had no better stomach for 
serious fighting than the condottieri of Italy in the sixteenth cen- 
tury ; the close fire of European musketry was more than they had 
bargained for; and artillery properly served, they could not face 
at all. Moreover their leaders changed sides without scruple, 
and were constantly plotting either to betray or supplant their 
employers. It is not surprising, therefore, if troops of this kind 
were such exceedingly perilous weapons in timid or maladroit 
hands, that the prince, governor, or usurper who had retained their 
services often went into action with a very uncomfortable distrust 
of his best regiments. In the eighteenth century most of the 



Rise of British Dominion in India 451 

revolted provinces of the empire had been appropriated by suc- 
cessful captains of these mercenaries, among whom the best 
fighting men were the Afghans. Their most celebrated leader was 
Ahmed Shah, the Abdallee, a mighty warrior of the Afghan nation, 
and the only great Asiatic soldier who appeared in India during 
the eighteenth century. 

Bibliographical Note 

Hunter, History of India, unfortunately broken off at the opening 
of the eighteenth century; A Brief History of the Indian Peoples, chap, x, 
on "The Mughal Dynasty." Innes, A Short History of the British 
in India. Malleson, History of the French in India; Final French 
Struggles in India; and The Founders of the Indian Empire. Seeley, 
Expansion of England, pp. 207 ff. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE CONTEST FOR CANADA 

While the English colonists were building up their relatively 
compact political communities on the narrow Atlantic seaboard, 
French settlers were scattering their energies over a vast area 
stretching from the Gulf of the St. Lawrence to the mouth of the 
Mississippi. Having explored the Mississippi and Ohio valleys, 
to say nothing of their Western expeditions towards the Rocky 
Mountains, the French naturally claimed all the lands drained by 
these great waterways. The forts which were the advance guard 
of their dominion were steadily pushed south and east toward 
the confines of the English settlements. The English also claimed 
these Western lands, and before the end of the seventeenth century 
trappers and explorers began to pour over the mountains into the 
West. Frontier warfare was carried on in a desultory but costly 
fashion until the Seven Years' War which was destined to destroy 
French dominion. The most striking actors in this last scene 
of a long drama were Wolfe and Montcalm in their final contest 
for the possession of Canada. 

§ i. Relative Strength of French and British 1 

An important aim of Pitt's enterprise in 1759 was the conquest 
of Canada. The other French dominions and dependencies in 
North America had already fallen like outposts; but Canada, 
as the citadel, remained — the last and greatest of all. That 
province is thought to derive its name from the Indian word Kan- 
ata, which denotes a collection of huts, but which the first discov- 
erers mistook as applying to the country. It had been settled, or, 
at least, explored, by the French, so early as the reign of Francis 

1 Lord Mahon, History of England, 1713-1783, Vol. IV, pp. 148 ff. 

452 



The Contest for Canada 453 

the First; but it was not until the next century that the cities 
of Quebec and Montreal arose, — the former in connection with 
the Commercial Company of the West Indies, the latter with 
the religious seminary of St. Sulpice. Louis XIV, however, early 
in his reign decided on resuming the rights of the crown and form- 
ing Canada into a royal government. In 1759 the population 
of this colony was sixty thousand souls ; scarcely more — so 
rapid has been the growth of its prosperity — than the annual 
amount of its immigration eighty-three years afterwards. In 
fact, few countries were ever more highly gifted with whatever 
can conduce to the welfare and greatness of a people: a fertile 
soil, abundant and excellent timber, navigable lakes and rivers, 
a rigorous, but healthy and invigorating, climate. 

In comparing together the French and the English colonists 
in North America at this period of 1759, we shall find, as is ac- 
knowledged by the French historians, the English far superior 
in numbers and wealth, in trade and industry. But, on the other 
hand, the French had reaped no small advantage from their more 
lively temper and conciliatory manners; they had attached to 
themselves much the greater proportion of the Red Indian tribes. 
It is true that the English as well as the French could claim the 
assistance of some of these savage allies who, besides fighting 
with courage or suffering with firmness, were ever ready to destroy 
defenceless property, to fire unguarded outposts, to murder and to 
scalp their prisoners — atrocities which both English and French 
accused each other by turns of secretly directing, and which it 
is certain at least that neither were sufficiently zealous to prevent. 
But by far the larger numbers of this Indian race, from the mouth 
of the St. Lawrence to the mouth of the Mississippi, had become 
estranged from the English and friendly to the French. No man 
was more skilful in maintaining this attachment, or employing it 
in war, than the Marquis de Montcalm, the French general in 
Canada, and the second in authority to their governor, the Marquis 
de Vaudreuil. Montcalm was born at Nismes in 1 712; he had 
attained high rank in the service of his country at home, and no 
less high praise for skill, honor, and intrepidity. To cope with 
such an adversary on his own ground, within sight of his own 
walls of Quebec, required no common mind; a hero was needed, 
but a hero was found when the execution of Pitt's designs on 
Canada was wisely committed to Wolfe. 



454 English Historians 



§ 2. Career and Character oj Wolfe 

The father of our hero, General Edward Wolfe, a veteran from 
the wars of Marlborough, had on his retirement fixed himself at 
Westerham in Kent, where he rented the vicarage house as his 
residence. In that house his eldest son James was born in 1726. 
At the early age of fourteen the boy entered the army. He was 
present at the battles of Dettingen in 1742, of Fontenoy in 1745, 
and of Lauffeld in 1747. Such was his conduct on the last occa- 
sion as to attract the notice and receive the thanks of his chief, 
the Duke of Cumberland. After the peace — being already at 
the age of twenty-two a lieutenant-colonel — he was quartered 
in Scotland, and then in the south of England. 

Nature had done but little for him either in comeliness or vigor; 
he had flaming red hair, and, contrary to the fashion of the times, 
wore no powder to conceal it. Even from his early youth he had 
suffered very severely from pains, and the seeds of fatal diseases 
were deep-laid in his constitution. Nor were his first address 
and manner engaging, although in private life he was esteemed 
by all who knew him as upright, religious, and humane. It was 
observed by himself in writing to his mother : "My nature requires 
some extraordinary events to produce itself. I want that atten- 
tion and those assiduous cares that commonly go along with good- 
nature and humanity. In the common occurrences of life I own 
I am not seen to advantage." Happy they who can thus calmly 
and truly judge their own character ! Still happier they to whom 
"extraordinary events" do afford an open field for extraordinary 
powers ! How common and how cruel either of these alternatives 
in human life, — incapacities which embitter and disgrace a high 
station, or talents which pine in a low one ! 

The correspondence of Wolfe contains frequent and favorable 
indications of his character. To his mother he writes from Glas- 
gow, "I have observed your instructions so religiously that, 
rather than want the Word, I got the reputation of a very good 
Presbyterian, by frequenting the kirk of Scotland till our chaplain 
appears." It may be remembered that Dr. Johnson, on the con- 
trary, thought it better to pass several months without joining 
in public worship rather than attend a church which rejected 
Episcopal ordination. Thus, again, Wolfe writes from Inverness : 
"There are times when men fret at trifles, and quarrel with their 
toothpicks. In one of these ill habits I exclaim against my present 



The Contest for Canada 455 

condition, and think it the worst of all, but, coolly and temperately, 
it is plainly the best. Where there is most employment and least 
vice there one should wish to be." Thus, on another occasion, to 
his father: "By my mother's letter I find that your bounty and 
liberality keep pace, as they usually do, with my necessities. I 
shall not abuse your kindness, nor receive it unthankfully, and 
what use I make of it shall be for your honor and the king's ser- 
vice; an employment worthy the hand that gives it." 

The amiable temper of Wolfe strongly inclined him from an 
early age to domestic life. In another passage of his corre- 
spondence he declares that he has "a turn of mind that favors 
matrimony prodigiously; I love children, and think them necessary 
to people in their later days." But struggling with such wishes, 
and at length overpowering them, glowed in his mind an ardent 
and chivalrous love of fame. It is this union of the gentle and the 
bold — of ambition and affection — that gives, as it appears to 
me, to his character an especial charm. His profession he had 
closely studied, and he thoroughly understood it. And he possessed, 
moreover, what no mere study can confer, — activity, enterprise, 
and readiness, — a courage that never quailed before danger, 
nor yet ever shrunk from responsibility. Over that aspiring spirit 
ill health could no more triumph than domestic repose. Thus, 
though sickness compelled him to return to England after the 
conquest of Cape Breton, he lost no time in offering his services 
to Pitt for the next American campaign. Pitt on his part bravely 
set at defiance the claims of seniority on this most important 
occasion. Had he consulted those claims only, — had he, like 
many ministers before and after him, thought the army list an 
unerring guide, — he might probably have sent out to Canada a 
veteran, experienced and brave, quick and active, and might, per- 
haps, have received in return a most eloquent and conclusive 
apology for being beaten or for standing still ! 

A slight incident connected with these times is recorded by tra- 
dition, and affords a striking proof how much a fault of manner 
may obscure and disparage high excellence of mind. After 
Wolfe's appointment, and on the day preceding his embarkation 
for America, Pitt, desirous of giving his last verbal instructions, 
invited him to dinner, Lord Temple being the only other guest. 
As the evening advanced, Wolfe — heated, perhaps, by his own 
aspiring thoughts, and the unwonted society of statesmen — broke 
forth into a strain of gasconade and bravado. He drew his sword, 
he rapped the table with it, he flourished it round the room, he 



456 English Historians 

talked of the mighty things which that sword was to achieve. The 
two ministers sat aghast at an exhibition so unusual from any 
man of real sense and real spirit. And when at last Wolfe had 
taken his leave, and his carriage was heard to roll from the door, 
Pitt seemed for the moment shaken in the high opinion which his 
deliberate judgment had formed of Wolfe; he lifted up his eyes 
and arms, and exclaimed to Lord Temple, "Good God! that 
I should have intrusted the fate of the country and of the admin- 
istration to such hands!" This story was told by Lord Temple 
himself to a near and still [1853] surviving relative, — one of 
my best and most valued friends. It confirms Wolfe's own 
avowal, that he was not seen to advantage in the common occur- 
rences of life, and shows how shyness may at intervals rush, as it 
were, for refuge, into the opposite extreme; but it should also 
lead us to view such defects of manner with indulgence, as prov- 
ing that they may co-exist with the highest ability and the purest 
virtue. 

§ 3. Pitt's Scheme for the Conquest of Canada 

The scheme of Pitt for the conquest of Canada comprised three 
separate expeditions, Quebec being the point of junction and the 
final object for each. On the left, a body of provincials under 
General Prideaux, and of friendly Indians under Sir William 
Johnson, was to advance against Niagara, reduce that fortress, 
embark on Lake Ontario, and threaten Montreal. In the centre 
was the main army, consisting of twelve thousand men, whose 
command had been taken from General Abercrombie after the 
last campaign, and intrusted to General Amherst. The -instruc- 
tions of Amherst were, to renew the attack on Ticonderoga, secure 
the navigation of Lake Champlain, and then push forward along 
the river Richelieu, to combine his operations with Wolfe. To 
Wolfe himself a force of eight thousand men was committed; 
he was ordered to embark in the fleet of Admiral Saunders, and 
to sail up the St. Lawrence as soon as its navigation should be 
clear of ice, with the view of attempting the siege of Quebec. This 
plan, as formed by a civilian, has not escaped censure from some 
military critics, who enlarge especially on the imprudence of pre- 
scribing or expecting cooperation between bodies of troops so 
widely distant, composed of such various elements, and liable to 
all the uncertainty and hazard of water-carriage. It was hardly 
possible that Amherst and Wolfe should arrive before Quebec 



The Contest for Canada 457 

at the same period of time; and failing their junction it was highly 
probable that the first who came would be overpowered by Mont- 
calm and his covering army. . . . 

§ 4. The Arrival of Wolfe 

The expeditions of Prideaux and Amherst are cast into the shade 
by Wolfe's. He had, according to his instructions, embarked on 
board the fleet of Admiral Saunders, which, after touching at 
Louisburg and Halifax, steered for the mouth of the St. Lawrence. 
During the voyage were taken two small store vessels of the enemy 
— a capture which seemed of slight importance, but which proved 
of the greatest, for on board these ships were found some excellent 
charts of the river, which enabled the admiral to. sail up the stream 
in perfect safety, without encountering any of those obstacles and 
perils that (in popular apprehension, at least) attended its navi- 
gation. It was not until the 27th of June, however, that the army 
was landed on the Isle of Orleans, in front of Quebec. On the 
very next night the enemy made an attempt to destroy our arma- 
ment by sending out from Quebec seven fire-ships. These came 
burning down the river, assisted by a strong current, and aimed 
directly upon our fleet; but our admiral, in expectation of some 
such design, had made preparations to defeat it. All his boats 
were out, well manned and well armed, with an officer in each. 
The fire-ships, on approaching, were instantly boarded ; grapplings 
and chains were affixed to them, after which they were towed, 
clear of every ship, to shore on the Isle of Orleans, where they 
burnt to ashes without having done the least damage. 

The Isle of Orleans, on which the army had landed, is about 
twenty miles long and seven broad, highly cultivated, and afford- 
ing to the soldiers every kind of refreshment after their long and 
weary navigation. Wolfe, however, left them little leisure for 
repose. On the 29th he despatched Brigadier Monckton, with 
four battalions, across to the right bank of the river, that they 
might take possession of Point Levis, a headland which looks 
towards Quebec, and where the enemy had constructed a battery. 
This object was soon attained, after only two or three slight skir- 
mishes between the advanced parties and the enemy's regular 
force. Wolfe himself marched with his main body along the island 
to its westernmost point, — from whence rose, full to view, the 
harbor and city of Quebec, — a sight at once tempting and dis- 
couraging. "For no place," says Burke, "seems possessed of 



458 English Historians 

greater benefits of Nature, nor is there any of which Nature seems 
more to have consulted the defence." In Wolfe's own words, 
" there is the strongest country, perhaps, in the world, to rest the 
defence of the town and the colony upon." 

§ 5. The Situation of Quebec for Defence 

The city of Quebec is built upon and beneath a ridge of rocks 
that terminates as a promontory at the spot where the river St. 
Charles flows from the left bank into the St. Lawrence. This 
is also the point where the St. Lawrence first in its upward navi- 
gation appears to narrow ; for while in the previous course of above 
one hundred leagues from its mouth it is nowhere less than from 
four to five leagues broad, — while it is divided by the Isle of 
Orleans into two both considerable streams, — it suddenly con- 
tracts above that Isle, and above the inlet of the St. Charles, so 
that opposite Quebec it is scarcely one mile over. Hence the name 
of Quebec has been derived from a word of similar sound, and 
denoting a strait, in one of the Indian tongues; while other writers 
deem it of French extraction, and perhaps only a corruption of 
the Norman Caudebec. At this period the town (divided into the 
Upper and Lower) might contain seven thousand souls ; it held a 
cathedral, a bishop's palace, and other stately buildings, and was 
crowned by the castle of St. Louis. In front of the harbor there 
spreads a considerable sandbank, so as to prevent the close approach 
or attack of any hostile fleet. Beyond the city, the rugged ridges 
on which it is built continue steep and precipitous for many miles 
along the river, and are there called the Heights of Abraham. 
In the opposite direction, again, from the mouth of the St. Charles 
down the left bank of the St. Lawrence, the ground is scarcely 
less difficult and rugged during several miles, until nearly opposite 
the point of the Isle of Orleans, where the stream of Montmorency, 
after flowing through the upper country, descends into the St. 
Lawrence by a fall of three hundred feet. 

To defend this strong country the Marquis de Montcalm had 
lately solicited and received fresh reinforcements from home. 
More than twenty ships, laden with supplies and recruits, had 
sailed before the blockade of the French ports and entered the 
St. Lawrence before the arrival of the English armament. Mont- 
calm had, however, few regular soldiers, but many Canadians 
and Indians, in all about ten thousand — "a numerous body 
of armed men," says Wolfe, "for I cannot call it an army. — If 



The Contest for Canada 459 

the Marquis," he adds, " had shut himself up in the town of Quebec, 
it would have been long since in our possession, because the de- 
fences are inconsiderable, and our artillery very formidable." 
But the skilful and wary Frenchman had resolved to trust to the 
strength of the country rather than that of the ramparts. He drew 
up his army on what was supposed the only accessible side of 
Quebec, on the line called Beauport, between the St. Charles and 
the Montmorency, communicating with Quebec by a bridge of 
boats over the St. Charles, and this ground, steep as it was by 
nature, he further intrenched at every open spot. On his front 
were the river and its sandbanks ; on his rear, impenetrable woods. 
Thus posted he was able, without running any risk or hazard, 
to prevent either an investment of the city or a battle upon equal 
terms. 

§ 6. The Opening of Wolfe's Campaign 

The first measure of Wolfe, such being the state of things, 
was to raise batteries at the points both of Levis and of the Isle 
of Orleans. From hence his artillery began to play upon Quebec, 
to the damage of the Upper Town, to the destruction of 
the Lower, but without any tendency or progress towards the 
reduction of the place. Montcalm remained entirely on the de- 
fensive, except on one occasion, when he sent sixteen hundred 
men across the St. Lawrence to attack the English batteries on 
Point Levis. "Bad intelligence, no doubt, of our strength," 
writes Wolfe, "induced him to this measure; however, the de- 
tachment judged better than their general, and retired." Some 
works for the security of the British hospitals and stores were 
meanwhile constructing on the Isle of Orleans ; after which, in the 
night of July the 9th, Wolfe caused his troops to be transported 
to the left bank, and encamped opposite the enemy, the river 
Montmorency flowing between them. During this time the enemy 
made repeated attempts against our ships by fire-rafts and other 
combustibles, but their designs were constantly baffled by the skill 
and vigilance of Saunders. A squadron was also despatched 
under Admiral Holmes, to pass by Quebec and fix its station far- 
ther up the St. Lawrence, so that the river might be blockaded 
both above and below the town. 

The great object of the English general was now to entice or 
decoy the enemy from their strong camp to an engagement. Not 
only did he endeavor to alarm them for Quebec on the opposite 
side, by means of Holmes's squadron, but he repeatedly sent 



460 English Historians 

detachments along the Montmorency to make a feint of passing 
that river farther from the falls. But no stratagem sufficed to 
draw the French commander from his advantageous post. Wolfe 
had also the mortification of seeing no effect from a manifesto 
which he had issued at his first landing, to assure the Canadians 
of protection in their persons, property, and religion, provided 
they remained quiet and took no part in the war. "Now, on the 
contrary," as he states himself, "we have continual skirmishes; 
old people, seventy years of age, and boys of fifteen, fire at our de- 
tachments, and kill or wound our men, from the edges of the 
woods." Incensed at such conduct, the general adopted, or at 
least connived at, a cruel retaliation. All the detached houses, 
the barns, the stables, — nay, even the standing corn, — were 
devoted to utter destruction, and thus both banks of the river 
began immediately to display a most dismal aspect of fire and 
smoke. Still, however, Montcalm, wisely intent on final triumph, 
remained immovable. 

Nothing, therefore, remained for Wolfe but to attack the French 
in their intrenchments. The day he fixed for this hazardous 
attempt was the 31st of July; the place he selected was the mouth 
of the Montmorency, as the only quarter where his artillery could 
be brought into play, and from whence his retreat, in case of 
a repulse, could be secure. Accordingly the boats of the fleet 
were filled with grenadiers, and rowed towards the shore at 
the proper time of tide. As they drew near many of the 
boats grounded upon a ledge of rocks: an accident that caused 
some disorder and great delay. On reaching land the grena- 
diers had been directed to form themselves upon the beach, and 
to halt until other troops on their right had passed the Mont- 
morency ford, and were ready to assist them. But whether from 
the noise and hurry of their landing, or from their own ill- 
regulated ardor, they rushed at once and impetuously towards 
the enemy's intrenchments. The enemy, from the summit of the 
heights, received them with a galling fire, which threw them pres- 
ently into confusion, and obliged them to seek shelter behind a 
deserted redoubt. In this situation — unable to rally under so 
severe a fire, while the night drew on, while a tempest was 
gathering, while the tide began to make — the general saw no 
other resource than to order a retreat. This retreat he conducted 
with skill, everywhere exposing his person with characteristic 
intrepidity. "The French," he says, "did not attempt to interrupt 
our march. Some of their savages came down to murder such 



The Contest for Canada 461 

wounded as could not be brought away, and to scalp the dead, 
as their custom is." 

In this check the troops had sustained no inconsiderable loss, 
and, what was worse, had become downcast and dispirited. There 
seemed no longer any hope of forcing the French lines. The pros- 
pect of cooperation from Amherst or from Johnson, on which 
they had confidently reckoned, grew daily fainter and fainter. 
They learned, indeed, from some prisoners, that Niagara had been 
taken ; that Ticonderoga and Crown Point had been abandoned ; 
— but week after week passed on, the season wasted apace, and 
no auxiliaries appeared. Wolfe himself, fatigue and anxiety 
preying on his delicate frame, fell violently ill of a fever. No 
sooner was his health in some degree restored, than he proceeded 
with the admiral and the chief engineer to inspect, as closely as 
they could, the works of Quebec, with a view to a general assault; 
but there seemed to them no hope of success from such an enter- 
prise. Wolfe had also summoned to council his second and third 
in command, — Brigadiers Monckton and George Townshend, 
the brother of Charles. It was their unanimous opinion, that no 
other chance remained than to carry the troops above the town, 
and thus again endeavor to draw Montcalm from his inaccessible 
post. In pursuance of this determination the camp at Mont- 
morency was broken up, and the army moved across the river to 
Point Levis. From thence — again going on board their trans- 
ports — they passed Quebec, and proceeded several miles up the 
St. Lawrence, when they once more disembarked on its right bank. 
So much had their ranks been thinned by death or by disease, 
that, after providing for the necessary defence of the Isle of Orleans, 
and of Point Levis, there remained scarcely more than thirty- 
six hundred effective men for action. To conceal in some degree 
their scanty numbers, and to spread doubts and alarms among 
the enemy, Admiral Holmes's squadron was directed to make 
movements up the river for several successive days, as if threatening 
more than one point above the town. The Marquis de Mont- 
calm was not, however, induced to quit his lines; he merely de- 
spatched M. de Bougainville, with about fifteen hundred men, to 
watch the motions of the English army, and to keep alongside 
with it on the opposite shore. 

It was under such circumstances, and on the 9th of September, 
that Wolfe addressed his last letter to the Secretary of State. His 
own view of his prospects was most gloomy ; he writes as if anxious 
to prepare the public mind in England for his failure or retreat. 



462 English Historians 

and as if his main motive in still remaining were to keep the French 
army in play, and divert it from other quarters. Here are his 
own concluding words, "I am so far recovered as to do business, 
but my constitution is entirely ruined, without the consolation of 
having done any considerable service to the state, or without 
any prospect of it." Let him who reads these words and their 
event learn from them never to lose hope of success in an honorable 
cause. The aid of Providence, as it should never be presumed on, 
so it should never be despaired of. Within five days from the 
date of that letter the name of Wolfe had become immortal to all 
ages! 

§ 7. Climbing the Heights of Abraham 

It does not seem certain at what period or by what accident 
the English general first conceived the daring thought to land his 
troops beneath the Heights of Abraham, on some point less guarded 
than the rest. But the honor of that first thought belongs to Wolfe 
alone ; and, once conceived, it was no less ably and boldly pursued. 
The ships under Admiral Saunders were directed to make a feint 
opposite the French camp at Beaufort, as if another attack upon 
it were designed. A similar demonstration on the opposite side 
— three leagues higher up the St. Lawrence — was enjoined to 
Admiral Holmes. At or near his own station, Wolfe collected as 
many boats as he could without raising suspicion and alarm. All 
preparations being completed, he suddenly gave orders for the 
troops to embark about one o'clock in the morning of the 13th of 
September, favored by a dark night and by a flowing tide. There 
was only room on board for about half his army, and the remain- 
der was left for a second embarkation.. The point to which he 
steered was a small bay or inlet, less than two miles above Quebec. 
It has ever since borne the name of "Wolfe's Cove." Swiftly, 
but silently, did the boats fall down with the tide, unobserved 
by the enemy's sentinels, who were, or who should have been, at 
their posts along the shore. Of the soldiers on board, how eagerly 
must every heart have throbbed at the coming conflict; how in- 
tently must every eye have contemplated the dark outline as it 
lay pencilled upon the midnight sky, and as every moment it grew 
closer and clearer, of the hostile heights ! Not a word was spoken, 
not a sound was heard beyond the rippling of the stream. Wolfe 
alone, thus tradition has told us, repeated in a, low voice to 
the other officers in his boat those beautiful stanzas with which 
a country churchyard inspired the muse of Gray, One noble 



The Contest for Canada 463 

line — "The paths of glory lead but to the grave " — must have 
seemed at such a moment fraught with mournful meaning. At 
the close of the recitation Wolfe added, "Now, gentlemen, I 
would rather be the author of that poem than take Quebec." 

On reaching the northern bank at the spot designed, — and 
Wolfe was amongst the first to leap on shore, — the troops found 
themselves at the foot of a high and precipitous cliff, leading to an 
extensive tableland, — the Heights of Abraham. Close upon the 
brow of the hill was the post of a French captain, with one hundred 
and fifty men. There was but a single path upwards, scarcely 
to be discovered in the darkness, and so narrow that in some places 
no two could go abreast. But the ardor of Wolfe and of his men 
was not to be repressed. The vanguard, led by Colonel Howe, 
a brother of the nobleman who fell at Ticonderoga, began to scale 
the precipice, each man scrambling and climbing as he best could, 
but mostly pulling themselves up by the bushes and brambles, 
by the stumps of trees, or by the projecting points of rock. The 
enemy's picket, roused at length, but too late, heard the rustling 
from below, and fired down the precipice at random, as our men 
did up into the air. But immediately after this chance-volley, 
the French, struck with panic at the strangeness of the attempt, 
and the sudden appearance of foes, whom they supposed on the 
other side of the river, fled from their post, notwithstanding all 
the exertions of their officer. Our vanguard reached the summit 
in safety, and at once formed itself in line. Fresh detachments 
from below were now continually ascending, and a single piece 
of artillery was also by main force dragged up. Meanwhile the 
boats had gone back for the second embarkation under Brigadier 
Townshend, and thus at daybreak the whole British army stood 
in order of battle upon the heights. 

§ 8. The Battle on the Heights 

When the Marquis de Montcalm was first informed that the 
English army appeared on the Heights of Abraham, he thought 
the rumor only another feint to draw him from his lines ; but, on 
riding forward, his own eyes convinced him of his error. Still, 
however, he was confident of a victory over his assailants. "I 
see them," he said, "where they ought not to be; but if we must 
fight, I shall crush them." Without further delay, he hurried over 
the St. Charles by the bridge of boats, with as many of his troops 
as he could muster for action on so sudden an emergency. He 



464 English Historians 

found the English already advancing, and formed on the high 
ground at the back of Quebec. They had no cavalry, and only 
one gun, but were full of hope and ardor. Their left wing had 
been drawn out by Wolfe in the manner which military men call 
en potence; that is, a body with two faces to the enemy, so as to 
guard against its being outflanked. Amongst the troops in this 
quarter was a Highland regiment, one of Pitt's recent creation, 
and already conspicuous for its bravery and conduct; several of 
its men had been in Howe's vanguard, and thus the first to scale 
the precipice. On the right were the Louisburg grenadiers, ex- 
tending towards the St. Lawrence, and with a regiment behind 
them as a reserve. It was in the front of this right wing, where 
the hottest fire was expected, that Wolfe had fixed his own station. 
The dispositions of Montcalm on his part were equally judicious. 
He had skilfully intermingled his regular and Canadian regiments, 
so as to strengthen and support the latter, while the greater part 
of his Indians were to spread themselves beyond the English left, 
and endeavor to outflank it. The thickets and copses in his 
front he filled with fifteen hundred of his best marksmen, who 
kept up an irregular but galling fire. By these skirmishers the 
advanced pickets of the English were driven in with something 
of confusion ; but Wolfe hastened to ride along the line, encouraging 
the men to stand firm, telling them that the light infantry had only 
obeyed his instructions, and, above all, enjoining them to reserve 
their fire until the enemy should come within forty yards of the 
muzzles of their guns. Thus our troops remained immovable, 
while the French were coming on, and firing as they came. Many 
of our men were struck; Wolfe himself received a ball in his wrist, 
but he tied his handkerchief above the wound, and never swerved 
from his post. Immovable the troops remained until they saw 
the enemy within forty yards, then, indeed, a well-aimed and 
simultaneous volley was poured from the whole British line. No 
sooner had the smoke cleared away than the great effect of this 
close discharge became apparent; numbers of the enemy were 
lying on the ground ; some few had fled ; the greater part wavered. 
At this decisive moment Wolfe darted forward and cheered on 
his grenadiers to a charge. Just then a second ball struck him 
in the groin, but he dissembled his anguish, and continued to give 
his orders as before. A third shot, however, piercing his breast, 
he fell to the ground, and was carried to the rear. At nearly 
the same time, in another part of the field, Brigadier Monckton 
was severely wounded, and thus the command devolved on Briga- 



The Contest for Canada 465 

dier Townshend, who took all proper measures to complete the 
victory and to pursue the vanquished. - 

At the rear, to which he had been conveyed, Wolfe, meanwhile, 
lay expiring. From time to time he lifted his head to gaze on 
the field of battle, till he found his eyesight begin to fail. Then 
for some moments he lay motionless with no other sign of life 
than heavy breathing or a stifled groan. All at once an officer 
who stood by exclaimed, "See how they run!" — "Who run?" 
cried Wolfe, eagerly raising himself on his elbow. "The enemy," 
answered the officer; "they give way in all directions." — "Then 
God be praised!" said Wolfe, after a short pause; "I shall die 
happy." These were his last words ; he again fell back, and turn- 
ing on his side, as if by a sharp convulsion, expired. He was but 
thirty-three years of age, when thus — the Nelson of the army — 
he died amidst the tidings of the victory he had achieved. 



Bibliographical Note 

Parkman, Montcalm and Wolfe. Edgar, The Struggle for a Continent. 
Kingsford, The History of Canada, Vol. IV. Seeley, The Expansion of 
England. Bradley, The Fight with France for North America. 



2H 



PART VII 

ENGLAND UNDER THE GEORGES 

CHAPTER I 

WALPOLE AND HIS SYSTEM 

On the death of Queen Anne, in 17 14, the Tory party were 
completely discomfited by the Whigs. The former were ex- 
cluded from office and branded as Jacobites. The new king was 
made to feel that he owed his throne to the Whigs who crowded 
around him and identified their political enemies with traitors. 
The character of the king and his foreign interests led him to rely 
more and more on the victorious party and leave the management 
of domestic politics in their hands. It was under these circum- 
stances that Walpole became First Lord of the Treasury and 
Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1721 and at the same time virtual 
master of the country through his support in Parliament, his in- 
fluence with the king, his use of the appointments to government 
positions, and his corrupt practices. During his regime of nearly 
twenty years the foundations of party government and the cabinet 
system were so securely laid that later attempts to overthrow them 
failed. Though the life and work of Sir Robert Walpole have not 
been exhaustively treated by any modern writer, the student will 
find the brief biography by Mr. Morley, the statesman and brilliant 
man of letters, a suggestive and illuminating study, which gives a 
somewhat more favorable view of the practices of the former than 
is to be found in most other accounts. 

466 



Walpole and his System 467 

§ 1 . Walpole and Eighteenth-century Statesmen l 

Is it true to say that Walpole was unscrupulous in his means 
for grasping power and keeping it? That he gave some advice 
without a blush which any leading English statesman to-day 
would readily rather extinguish his public life than give, is unfortu- 
nately too certain. Writers on morals tell us that conduct has 
an aesthetic and an ethical aspect ; it is beautiful or ugly, as well as 
right or wrong. It is certain that, as some say, he had not the 
delicate sense of honor, which marks the ideal public man. But it 
cannot be disguised that many men have shown a want of a fine 
sense of honor, whom still we should hesitate to brand generally 
as either unscrupulous or unprincipled. Chatham acted in a way 
that was not at all to his honor, when he first offered to screen 
Walpole, and then on his offer being repulsed, redoubled the vio- 
lence of his attack. George III did many shabby, cunning, and 
unscrupulous things, yet tradition is gradually coming to pass him 
off as a very honest gentleman. Did Mr. Pitt exhibit perfect 
delicacy of honor when, on coming back to power in 1804, he 
allowed the stubborn king to ostracize Mr. Fox? Yet Pitt is 
usually treated as the pink of moral elevation, and he did undoubt- 
edly take a loftier view of the connection between public authority 
and private honor than had been the fashion before his time. The 
equity of history requires that we shall judge men of action by the 
standards of men of action. Nobody would single out highminded- 
ness as one of Walpole's conspicuous attributes. It is not a very 
common attribute among active politicians in any age. On the 
other hand, Walpole was neither low-minded nor small-minded. 
His son had a right to boast that he never gave up the interests of 
his party to serve his own, though he often gave up his own opin- 
ions to please friends who were serving themselves. With the 
firmest confidence in himself, he was neither pragmatical nor 
arrogant. He was wholly free from spite and from envy; he bore 
no malice, though when he had once found a man out in playing 
tricks, he took care never to forget it; and he was right, for the 
issues at stake were too important to allow him to forget. 

§ 2. The Exclusion of Able Colleagues 

It is said that he could not brook a colleague of superior ability, 
and that he took care to surround himself with mediocrities like 

1 Morley, Walpole, pp. 116 ff. By permission of Re. Hon. John Morley 
and The Macmillan Company, Publishers. 



468 English Historians 

the Duke of Newcastle. We may test the accusation by the con- 
duct of Chatham. Nobody has ever taunted him with this ignoble 
jealousy, yet he acted precisely as Walpole acted. After fighting 
against Newcastle as long as he could, he gave way to him just as 
Walpole had found it expedient to do. "I borrowed the Duke 
of Newcastle's majority," said Pitt in 1757, "to carry on the public 
business." It was his majority, not his mediocrity, that Walpole 
valued. So with the proscriptions. Pitt peremptorily excluded 
Henry Fox from his famous administration, though Fox was 
the ablest debater in Parliament; and he declined to advance 
Charles Townshend, who was more near to being his intellectual 
equal than anybody else then in the House of Commons. Neither 
in Pitt's case nor in W T alpole's case is it necessary to ascribe 
their action to anything worse than the highly judicious convic- 
tion that whether in carrying out a great policy of peace like 
Walpole's, or an arduous policy of war like Pitt's, the very worst 
impediment that a minister can have is a colleague in his cabinet 
who spoils superior ability by perversities of restlessness and 
egotism. There is not one of the able men ostracized, as it is 
called, by Walpole whose political steadiness and personal fidelity 
he could safely trust; and not one of them, let us not forget to 
add, who, for fifteen years after his fall, ever showed himself any 
better able to work with other colleagues and leaders than he had 
been to work with Walpole. 

§ 3. Walpole not an Intriguer 

Walpole took the pleasures, the honors, the prizes of the world 
as they came in his way, and he thoroughly relished and enjoyed 
them; but what his heart was seriously set upon all the time — 
seriously, persistently, strenuously, devotedly — was the promo- 
tion of good government and the frustration and confusion of its 
enemies. When men got in his way, he thrust them aside, with- 
out misgiving or remorse, just as a commander in the field would 
remove a meddling, wrong-headed, or incompetent general of 
division without remorse. But to be remorseless is a very different 
thing from being unscrupulous. I am not aware of a single proof 
that Walpole ever began those intrigues against his enemies which 
they were always so ready to practise against him. It was Stan- 
hope and Sunderland, not Walpole, who began and carried out 
the intrigues that ended in the schism of 17 17. It was Carteret 
who caballed with the Tory leaders against his own colleagues 



Walpole and his System 469 

after Sunderland's death. It was Bolingbroke and the Duchess 
of Kendal who strove by underhand arts to procure access for the 
former to George I, and when Walpole found out what was going 
on, he at once boldly urged the king to grant Bolingbroke his 
audience, and to hear all that he had to say. It was Chesterfield 
who tried to set up a clique against Walpole within his own min- 
istry. Much is made of the case of Townshend. But it is rather 
a paradox to prove Walpole's imperious refusal to share power with 
able colleagues by referring us to Townshend, with whom he 
worked in unbroken cordiality for the best part of thirty years 
and with whom he did loyally share power, himself in a relation 
rather subordinate than otherwise, for three of these years. It was 
Townshend, moreover, who at the last took advantage of his 
journey with the king to Hanover secretly to ingratiate himself 
in the royal favor to the disadvantage of Walpole at home. Plenty 
of intriguing was carried on, but not by Walpole. A candid and 
particular examination of the political history of that time, so far 
as the circumstances are known to us, leads to the conclusion that 
of all his contemporaries, from men of genius like Bolingbroke 
and Carteret, from able and brilliant men like Townshend and 
Chesterfield, Wyndham, and Pulteney, down to a mediocre per- 
sonage like the Duke of Newcastle, Walpole was the least unscrup- 
ulous of the men of that time, the most straightforward, bold, and 
open, and the least addicted to scheming and cabal. He relied 
more than they did, not less, upon what after all in every age is 
the only solid foundation of political power, though it may not 
always lead to the longest term of office — upon his own superior 
capacity, more constant principle, firmer will, and clearer vision. 

§ 4. The Charge of Parliamentary Corruption 

That Walpole practised what would now be regarded as Parlia- 
mentary corruption is undeniable. But political conduct must be 
judged in the light of political history. Not very many years before 
Walpole a man was expected to pay some thousands of pounds 
for being made Secretary of State, just as down to our own time he 
paid for being made colonel of a regiment. Many years after 
Walpole, Lord North used to job the loans, and it was not until the 
younger Pitt set a loftier example that any minister saw the least 
harm in keeping a portion of a public loan in his own hands for 
distribution among his private friends. For the minister to buy 
the vote of a member of Parliament was not then thought much 



47^ English Historians 

more shameful than almost down to our own time it has been 
thought shameful for a member of Parliament to buy the vote of 
an elector. Is it a greater sin against political purity to give a 
member five hundred pounds for his vote than to advance three 
thousand for the purchase of his seat ? Yet even the austere Pitt 
laughed, as Walpole might have laughed at what he called the 
squeamish and maiden coyness of the House of Commons, in 
hesitating to admit the right of the owners of rotten boroughs to 
be compensated for the disfranchisement of their property. It is 
absurd to suppose that Walpole first tempted mankind into rapac- 
ity and selfishness. Even his enemies admitted that corruption 
had been gaining^ ground ever since the time of Charles II. No- 
body denies that in all its forms, the venality alike of members 
and constituencies was vastly worse thirty years after Walpole's 
disappearance than anybody ever asserted it to be in his time. To 
say, with some modern writers, that Walpole organized corruption 
as a system, that he made corruption the normal process of Par- 
liamentary government, that he governed by means of an assembly 
which was saturated with corruption, is to use language enor- 
mously in excess of any producible evidence and of all legitimate 
inference. It is to attach a weight to the furious and envenomed 
diatribes of the Craftsman, to which the very violence of their 
language shows them not to be entitled. With unanswerable force 
it has been asked by Sir Robert Peel and other men of experience 
in public affairs, how it came about that if Walpole did really 
corrupt his age, and if the foundation of his strength was the 
systematic misapplication of the public money to the purposes of 
bribery, yet a select committee of twenty-one members — nine- 
teen of them his bitter enemies — appointed after his fall to lay a 
siege to his past life equal in duration to the siege of Troy, pro- 
duced no specific facts to support the allegations of bribery which 
had been used every week and every day for so many years to in- 
flame public resentment against him? Two of the great heads 
of accusation shrunk up to miserable dimensions and the third 
remained a matter of vague and unsupported inference. Would 
so lame and impotent a conclusion have been possible if sub- 
stantial grounds for the accusation had been in existence ? 

The charge of undue influence at elections ended in the pro- 
duction of a mere mouse from the laboring mountain. Walpole 
appears to have promised the mayor a place in the revenue service 
at Weymouth, in order to secure a returning officer of the right 
color; to have removed some customs officers who declined to 



Walpole and his System 471 

vote for the right candidate, and to have disbursed some petty 
sums for legal proceedings in boroughs. We find nothing like 
the lavish purchase of boroughs that was practised wholesale by 
George III, and which explains the vast debts that loaded the 
civil list of a king who was personally the most frugal of men. 
Lord North thought nothing of paying Lord Edgcumbe £15,000 
for his boroughs, or buying three seats from Lord Falmouth for 
£7500, though the bargain nearly went off because he would not 
make the pounds guineas. Walpole never approached such a 
scale as this. 

§ 5. Peculation and Secret Service Money 

Nor, again, did the article of conceding fraudulent contracts 
produce any more appalling disclosure than that in the single case 
of a not very large contract for payment of troops in Jamaica the 
terms had been suspiciously handsome. Finally, the grand accu- 
sation of peculation and profusion in the expenditure of the secret- 
service money can be placed no higher than a doubtful inference 
from a doubtful figure. The committee founded their case on the 
amount of the secret-service money. That amount they pro- 
nounced to be so excessive that it could only be explained by a 
corrupt and improper destination. They took a period for the 
purposes of comparison, at their own will and pleasure. The 
secret-service money during the ten years from 1707 to 171 7 only 
amounted to £338,000. The same head under Walpole's ad- 
ministration from 1 73 1 to 1 741 was no less than £1,440,000. 
Therefore, they argued — and modern writers are content with their 
argument — a large proportion of the immense expenditure of secret- 
service money in Walpole's government was devoted to the direct 
purchase of members of Parliament. The premiss, we repeat, 
can only be accepted with qualifications ; next, even if the premiss 
be taken as offering a precisely just and accurate comparison, 
the desired conclusion does not necessarily or even reasonably 
follow from it. The ten years from 1707 to 1717 were arbitrarily 
chosen ; if the first ten years of Anne or of George I had been taken, 
the figure would have been much higher, and therefore more 
favorable to Walpole. The items of the account, moreover, are 
taken in one way, in order to attenuate the figure of the first period, 
and in another way, when the object is to expand the figure of the 
second period; certain payments were charged to the secret-ser- 
vice fund in the one case, which in the other case had either not 



472 English Historians 

been made or else had gone to another account. The compara- 
tive statement is, therefore, fallacious. Fairly measured, this 
branch of expenditure, so far as it covered a really secret employ- 
ment of money which it would be against the interest of the public 
service to disclose, amounted during ten years of Walpole's admin- 
istration to less than an annual average of £79,000; and that, 
according to Coxe, is much less than the sum expended for similar 
purposes during a similar term of years before the Revolution. 

Let us, however, suppose that the amount was even higher than 
this. Why are we to assume as a matter of course that most of it 
was spent in buying members or boroughs, rather than in the 
avowed objects of buying secret intelligence both at home and from 
abroad, and in buying foreign ministers? It is certain that 
Walpole was always singularly well informed as to the designs of 
foreign courts. There were also people at home on whom it was 
necessary to keep a still more vigilant eye. The designs of Jaco- 
bite plotters were obscurer and more intricate than the diplomatic 
manoeuvres of Madrid, Vienna, or Versailles. Walpole was wisely 
willing to pay handsomely for good information about them. It 
was said of him that while he was profuse to his friends, his lib- 
erality was literally unbounded to his tools and his spies. Even 
in our day, no British minister has ventured to dispense with ser- 
vices of this odious kind, and every minister still very properly 
refuses to account to Parliament or to any auditor for a shilling 
of it. That some of this money went in bribes to members of 
Parliament, it would be childish to deny. We shall presently 
come upon an instance where £900 was paid to two members of the 
House of Commons for their support. Let us take that as incon- 
trovertible. But it goes a very little way towards the broad accu- 
sation that we are examining. The very fact that the king 
grumbled loudly at the transaction which cost no more than £900, 
shows that such transactions did not usually mount up to a very 
large proportion of one £144,000 a year. The one detailed case, 
therefore, that can be adduced to support the assumption that 
most of the secret-service money at Walpole's disposal went in 
Parliamentary corruption, itself shows that the assumption is 
altogether exaggerated and extravagant. The figures prove too 
much. We may admit that the gentlemen who had taken Wal- 
pole's money would be likely to hold their peace about it, and we 
know that those who paid the money were authorized by the king 
to refuse to give evidence. Yet when all allowance has been made 
for these facts, considering how many scores of men must have 



Walpole and his System 473 

been secured, what enormous sums on the hypothesis must have 
passed, and how passionately ready the great majority of the 
committee were to procure evidence good or bad at any price, it is 
surely incredible that, if corruption had been practised on any- 
thing approaching to the vast and systematic scale which is so 
loosely imputed, not one single case should have been forthcoming. 

§ 6. The Spoils of Office 

The substance of the charge of corruption is to be sought, 
not in occasional payment of blackmail to a member or a patron, 
but in the fact that he reserved the crown patronage down to the 
last morsel, exclusively for members of his own party. He acted 
on the principle that is accepted in the United States, that is not 
disavowed in France, and that, although disavowed in Great Brit- 
ain, has not even yet wholly disappeared there. A member of 
Parliament who desired anything, from a lucrative office for himself 
down to a place as tide-waiter for the son of a tenant, knew that 
his only chance would be to support the administration. The 
number of offices held by men in Parliament was very great. 
When Burke introduced his famous scheme of economical reform 
(1780), he boasted that it would destroy influence equal to the 
offices of at least fifty members of Parliament. In Walpole's time 
the number of place holders at the pleasure of the court must have 
been considerably in excess of fifty; for the place bill of 1743 had 
excluded a certain number of subordinate personages from seats 
in Parliament. Walpole insisted that all these gentlemen should 
be sound Whigs. To that extent, acting especially on the owners 
of boroughs, he systematically affected the disinterestedness and 
independence of the House of Commons. 

§ 7. The Price of Men 

Walpole has no doubt suffered much in the opinion of posterity 
as the supposed author of the shallow and cynical apophthegm, 
that " every man has his price." People who know nothing about 
Walpole believe and repeat this about him. Yet the story is a 
pure piece of misinterpretation. He never delivered himself 
of that famous slander on mankind. One day, mocking the 
flowery and declamatory professions of some of the patriots in 
opposition, he insisted on finding self-interest or family interest 
at the bottom of their fine things. "All these men," he said, "have 



474 English Historians 

their price." " As to the revolters," he told the king, "I know the 
reasons and I know the price of every one of them." Nor was he 
wrong, as time showed. It was not a general but a particular 
proposition, and as a particular proposition it was true. When 
an honest man came in his way, Walpole knew him well enough. 
"I will not say," he observed, "who is corrupt; but I will say who 
is not, and that is Shippen." And yet "honest Shippen " was one 
of the stoutest of his opponents. 

§ 8. The Evidence against Walpole 

The absence of any tangible evidence of novel, extraordinary, 
lavish, and widespread Parliamentary corruption on Walpole's 
part only coincides with the best positive testimony that we can 
get. Pitt, who was one of the most vehement promoters of the 
secret committee, five years later publicly acquitted Walpole 
of the worst of the charges brought against him, in terms ample 
enough to satisfy the late minister's own sons. Burke, again, 
says that it was his fortune to converse with many of the principal 
actors against Walpole, and to examine with care original docu- 
ments concerning important transactions of those times. His 
writings, as everybody knows, contain more than one passage, 
showing that he had informed himself about Walpole's character 
and acts ; and in truth much of the great writer's theoretic wisdom 
is but the splendid generalization of the great minister's particular 
policy and practice. W 7 hat Burke has to say on the point -that we 
are now discussing is this: "Walpole was an honorable man and 
a sound Whig. He was not, as the Jacobites and discontented 
Whigs of his own time have represented him, and as ill-informed 
people still represent him, a prodigal and corrupt minister. They 
charged him, in their libels and seditious conversations, as having 
first reduced corruption to a system. Such was their cant. But 
he was far from governing by corruption. He governed by party 
attachments. The charge of systematic corruption is less ap- 
plicable to him, perhaps, than to any minister who ever served the 
crown for so great a length of time. He gained over very few from 
the opposition." — {Appeal from New to Old Whigs.) Evidence 
of this kind, coming from a man of affairs in the generation 
immediately following, in contact with some actors in those events 
and with many who must have known about them at first hand, 
must outweigh any amount of sweeping presumptions by histori- 
ans writing a century and a half after Walpole's fall. The part 



Walpole and his System 475 

and proportion of corruption in Walpole's management of members 
is to be gathered from what he did to secure the rejection of the 
bill for lowering the interest on the funds. He got time enough, 
says Hervey, "to go about to talk to people, to solicit, to intimidate, 
to argue, to persuade, and perhaps to bribe." This may be taken 
as a fair example of his usual practice. Bribery was an expedient 
in the last resort, and the appeal to cupidity came after appeals 
to friendship, to fear, to reason, and to all those mixed motives, 
creditable, permissible, and equivocal, which guide votes in re- 
formed and unreformed Parliaments alike. 

§ 9. Walpole's Private Affairs 

The pecuniary affairs of public men are no concern of the out- 
side world, unless they are tainted with improbity. So many 
charges were made against Walpole under this head, that it is 
necessary to glance at them. I shall begin with the least serious. 
Very 'early in his career of minister Walpole was taunted with 
abusing his patronage by granting places and reversions of places 
to his relatives. When his son Horace was little more than a child, 
he was made Clerk of the Estreats and Controller of the Pipe, with 
a salary of £300 a year. At the age of eighteen or nineteen, he 
became Inspector of Customs ; on resigning that post a year later, 
he was made Usher of the Exchequer, then worth £900 a year; 
and Horace Walpole was able to boast that from the age of twenty 
he was no charge to his family. The duty of the usher was to 
furnish paper, pens, ink, wax, sand, tape, penknives, scissors, and 
parchment to the Exchequer, and the profits rose from £900 a year 
to an average of double that amount. The post of Collector of the 
Customs, worth nearly £2000 a year, was granted to Walpole him- 
self, and for the lives of Robert and Edward his sons. The bulk 
of the proceeds of this patent he devised to his son Horace. In 
1 72 1 the minister made his eldest son Clerk of the Pells, with three 
thousand a year; and in 1739 he gave him the gigantic prize of 
Auditor of the Exchequer, with a salary of seven thousand. Then 
when the eldest son resigned the pells on receiving the auditor- 
ship, the pells and the three thousand a year went to Edward 
Walpole, the next brother. All these great pa'tent offices 
were sinecures; they were always executed by deputy; the 
principal had not a week's work to do from the first annual 
quarter day to the last. W T e can imagine how these rank 
abominations would stink in the nostrils of the House of Commons 



476 English Historians 

and the Treasury to-day. Yet it is worth remembering that Burke, 
when he proposed his famous plan of economical reform (1780), 
though he admitted that the magnitude of the profits in the great 
patent ofhces called for reformation, still looked with complacency 
on an exchequer list filled with the descendants of the Walpoles, 
the Pelhams, and the Townshends, and maintained the expediency 
of these indirect provisions for the families of great public servants. 
Indirect rewards have long disappeared, and nothing is more 
certain than that the whole system of political pension, even as a 
direct and personal reward, is drawing to an end. Whether either 
the purity or the efficiency of political service will gain by the 
change is not so certain. Walpole at least can hardly be censured 
for doing what, in the very height of his zeal for reform, Burke 
seriously and deliberately defended. 

Abuse of patronage, however, was the least formidable of the 
charges that descended year after year in a storm on Walpole's 
head. He was roundly and constantly charged with sustaining a 
lavish private expenditure by peculation frcm public funds. 
The palace which he built for himself in Norfolk was matter for 
endless scandal. He planted gardens, people said, in places to 
which the very earth had to be transported in wagons. He set 
fountains flowing and cascades tumbling, where water was to be 
conveyed by long acqueducts and costly machines. He was a 
modern Sardanapalus, imitating the extravagance of Oriental 
monarchs at the expense of a free people whom he was at once 
impoverishing and betraying. They described him as going down 
to his country seat loaded with the spoils of an unfortunate nation. 
He had purchased most of the county of Norfolk, and held at least 
one-half of the stock of the Bank of England. It was plainly 
hinted that in view of a possible impeachment at seme future day, 
he had made himself safe by investing £150,000 in jewels and plate 
as an easily portable form of wealth. He had also secretly de- 
spatched £400,000 in a single year to bankers at Amsterdam, 
Vienna, Genoa, to be ready for him in case of untoward accidents. 

These lively fabrications undoubtedly represented the common 
rumor and opinion of the time, and were excellently fitted to nour- 
ish the popular dislike with which Walpole came to be regarded. 
They had their origin in the same suspicious temper toward an 
unpopular minister, which two generations before had made the 
people of London give to Clarendon's new palace in Piccadilly 
the name of Dunkirk House, and which a generation later prompted 
the charge that Lord Bute's great house and park at Luton had 



Walpole and his System 477 

come out of the bribes of France. They had hardly more solid 
foundation than the charge of saturating Parliament with corrup- 
tion. The truth seems to be that Walpole, like both the Pitts, was 
inexact and careless about money. Profusion was a natural 
element in a large, loose, jovial character like his, too incessantly 
preoccupied with business, power, government, and high affairs 
of State to have much regard for a wise private economy. He 
was supposed to contribute handsomely toward the expense of 
fighting elections. He expended in building, adding, and improv- 
ing at Houghton the sum of £200,000. He built a lodge in 
Richmond Park at a cost of £14,000. His famous hunting con- 
gresses are said to have come to £3000 a year — rather a moderate 
sum, according to the standard of to-day, for keeping open house 
for a whole county for several weeks in a vast establishment like 
Houghton. His collection of pictures was set down by Horace 
Walpole as having cost him £40,000 more ; but this I suspect to be 
a very doubtful figure, for according to a contemporary letter in 
Nichol's Literary Anecdotes, so many of the pictures were presents, 
that the whole cost could hardly have reached £30,000; and it 
is worth noting that the famous Guido, the gem of the collection, 
while it cost him some £600, was valued in the catalogue when it 
came to be sold to the Czarina at £3500. For all this outlay, his 
foes contended that the income of his estate and the known salary 
of his offices were inadequate. They assumed, therefore, that the 
requisite funds were acquired by the sale of honors, places, and 
pensions, and by the plunder of the secret-service money. 

Bibliographical Note 

Stanhope (Lord Mahon), History of England from 1713 to i?8j, Vol. Ill, 
chap. xxiv. Lecky, History of England in the Eighteenth Century, Vol. I, 
chaps, ii and iii. Cox, Memoirs of the Life and Administration of Walpole, 
an old but valuable work. Ewald,. Sir Robert Walpole. 



CHAPTER II 

JOHN WESLEY AND METHODISM 

It is generally admitted by historians that the religious life of 
the early part of the eighteenth century was marked by indifference 
and scepticism. Clergymen in the Established and Dissenting 
churches emphasized the intellect rather than the feelings in 
religion ; heated theological controversies and polemical pamphlet- 
eering fell out of fashion; instead of revelation or authority alone, 
theologians emphasized reason as the guide to religious truth. 
Voltaire, who had been in England, described an English sermon of 
the age as a " solid but sometimes dry dissertation which a man 
reads to the people without gesture and without particular exaltation 
of the voice." Another French visitor, Montesquieu, declared 
that there was no religion in England, and that the mention of it 
excited laughter. Even a distinguished bishop of the Church, 
Berkeley, wrote that cold indifference for all matters of faith and 
divine worship was thought good sense, and that it was so fashion- 
able to deny religion that a good Christian could hardly keep 
himself in countenance when it was mentioned. Though the 
religion of an age is difficult to measure and these sweeping state- 
ments of contemporaries must be taken with caution, there can be 
no doubt that, as a vital force in the lives of men, religion was at a 
very low ebb. The lower classes were often coarse and brutal in 
their habits, and they do not seem to have been reached by the 
ordinary sermons. It was under such conditions that there origi- 
nated in England a religious awakening that was destined to 
become one of the most powerful movements in the history of 
Christianity. Many accounts have been written about this move- 
ment and its founders, but most of them have been seriously biassed 

478 



John Wesley and Methodism 479 

by the convictions of the authors. A very fair view is to be found in 
Mr. Lecky's great work on the eighteenth century. 

§ 1. John Wesley and the Oxford Group x 

The Methodist movement was a purely religious one. All ex- 
planations which ascribe it to the ambition of its leaders, or to 
merely intellectual causes, are at variance with the facts of the case. 
The term Methodist was a college nickname bestowed upon a 
small society of students at Oxford, who met together between 1792 
and 1735 for the purpose of mutual improvement. They were 
accustomed to communicate every week, to fast regularly on 
Wednesdays and Fridays, and on most days during Lent, to read 
and discuss the Bible in common, to abstain from most forms of 
amusement and luxury, and to visit sick persons and prisoners in 
the jail. 

John Wesley, the master spirit of this society, and the future 
leader of the religious revival of the eighteenth century, was born 
in 1703, and was the second surviving son of Samuel Wesley, the 
rector of Ep worth, in Lincolnshire. His father, who had early 
abandoned Non-conformity, and acquired some reputation by many 
works both in prose and verse, had obtained his living from the 
government of William, and had led for many years a useful and 
studious life, maintaining a far higher standard of clerical duty 
than was common in his time. His mother was the daughter of an 
eminent Non-conformist minister, who had been ejected in 1662, 
and was a woman of rare mental endowments, of intense piety, 
and of a strong, original, and somewhat stern character. Their 
home was not a happy one. Discordant dispositions and many 
troubles darkened it. The family was very large. Many chil- 
dren died early. The father sank slowly into debt. His parish- 
ioners were fierce, profligate, and recalcitrant. When John Wesley 
was only six years old the rectory was burnt to the ground, and the 
child was forgotten among the flames, and only saved at the last 
moment by what he afterward deemed an extraordinary Provi- 
dence. All these circumstances doubtless deepened the natural 
and inherited piety for which he was so remarkable, and some 
strange and unexplained noises which during a long period were 
heard in the rectory, and which its inmates concluded to be 

^ecky; History of England in the Eighteenth Century, Cabinet Edition, 
Vol. Ill, pp. 37 ff. By permission of D. Appleton & Company, Pub- 
lishers. 



480 English Historians 

supernatural, contributed to that vein of credulity which ran 
through his character. 

He was sent to the Charterhouse, and from thence to Oxford, 
where at the age of twenty- three he was elected fellow of Lincoln. 
He had some years before acquired from his brother a certain 
knowledge of Hebrew, and he was speedily distinguished by his 
extraordinary logical powers, by the untiring industry with which 
he threw himself into the studies of the place, and above all by 
the force and energy of his character. His religious impressions, 
which had been for a time somewhat obscured, revived in their 
full intensity while he was preparing for ordination in 1725. He 
was troubled with difficulties, which his father and mother gradu- 
ally removed, about the damnatory clauses in the Athanasian 
Creed, and about the compatibility of the Articles with his de- 
cidedly Arminian views concerning election, and he was deeply 
influenced by the Imitation of Thomas a Kempis, by the Holy 
Living and Dying of Jeremy Taylor, and by Law's Serious Call. 
His life at Oxford became very strict. He rose every morning at 
four, a practice which he continued until extreme old age. He 
made pilgrimages on foot to William Law to ask for spiritual 
advice. He abstained from the usual fashion of having his hair 
dressed, in order that he might give the money so saved to the poor. 
He refused to return the visits of those who called on him, that he 
might avoid all idle conversation. His fasts were so severe that 
they seriously impaired his health, and extreme abstinence and 
gloomy views about religion are said to have contributed largely 
to hurry one of the closest of his college companions to an early 
and clouded death. 

The society hardly numbered more than fifteen members, and 
was the object of much ridicule at the university ; but it included 
some men who afterward played considerable parts in the world. 
Among them was Charles, the younger brother of John Wesley, 
whose hymns became the favorite poetry of the sect, and whose 
gentler, more submissive, and more amiable character, though 
less fitted than that of his brother for the great conflicts of public 
life, was very useful in moderating the movement, and in drawing 
converts to it by personal influence. Charles Wesley appears to 
have originated the society at Oxford ; he brought Whitefield into 
its pale, and besides being the most popular poet he was one of the 
most persuasive preachers of the movement. 

There too, above all, was George Whitefield, in after years the 
greatest pulpit orator of England. He was born in 17 14, in 



John Wesley and Methodism 481 

Gloucester, in the Bell Inn, of which his mother was proprietor, 
and where upon the decline of her fortunes he was for some time 
employed in servile functions. He had been a wild, impulsive boy, 
alternately remarkable for many mischievous pranks and for 
strange outbursts of religious zeal. He stole money from his 
mother, and he gave part of it to the poor. He early declared his 
intention one day to preach the Gospel, but he was the terror of 
the Dissenting minister of his neighborhood, whose religious ser- 
vices he was accustomed to ridicule and interrupt. He bought 
devotional books, read the Bible assiduously, and on one occasion, 
when exasperated by some teasing, he relieved his feelings, as he 
tells us, by pouring out in his solitude the menaces of the 11 8th 
Psalm ; but he was also passionately fond of card-playing, novel- 
reading, and the theatre, he was two or three times intoxicated, 
and he confesses with much penitence " to a sensual passion " for 
fruits and cakes. His strongest natural bias was toward the stage. 
He indulged it on every possible occasion, and at school he wrote 
plays and acted in a female part. 

Owing to the great poverty of his mother he could only go to 
Oxford as a servitor, and his career there was a very painful one. 
Thomas a Kempis, Drelincourt's Defence against Death, and -Law's 
devotional works had all their part in kindling his piety into a 
flame. He was haunted with gloomy and superstitious fancies, 
and his religion assumed the darkest and most ascetic character. 
He always chose the worst food, fasted twice a week, wore woollen 
gloves, a patched gown, and dirty shoes, and was subject to 
paroxysms of a morbid devotion. He remained for hours pros- 
trate on the ground in Christ's Church walk in the midst of the 
night, and continued his devotions till his hands grew black with 
cold. One Lent he carried his fasting to such a point that when 
Passion Week arrived he had hardly sufficient strength to creep 
upstairs, and his memory was seriously impaired. In 1733 he 
came in contact with Charles Wesley, who brought him into the 
society. To a work called The Life of God in the Soul of Man, 
which Charles Wesley put into his hands, he ascribed his first 
conviction of that doctrine of free salvation which he afterward 
made it the great object of his life to teach. . . . 

§ 2. The Conversion of John Wesley 

[At the invitation of General Oglethorpe, John Wesley left Ox- 
ford in 1737 to go out as pastor and missionary to the former's 
21 



482 English Historians 

colony of Georgia, recently established as a refuge for imprisoned 
debtors and unfortunate classes of Europe. He was sadly dis- 
appointed with the Indians whom he hoped to convert, declaring 
them to be " gluttons, thieves, dissemblers, and liars." More- 
over his work with the colonists was not altogether successful, and 
he returned to England after a stay of two years. For sometime 
afterward he was sorely troubled by what seemed to him the 
inadequacy of his religion, and longed for "that faith which none 
can have without knowing that he hath it."] 

This condition could not last long. At length, on May 24, — a 
day which he ever after looked back upon as the most momentous 
in his life, — the cloud was dispelled. Early in the morning, accord- 
ing to his usual custom, he opened the Bible at random, seeking 
for a Divine guidance, and his eye lighted on the words, "There 
are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises, even that 
ye should be partakers of the Divine nature." Before he left the 
house he again consulted the oracle, and the first words he read 
were, "Thou art not far from the kingdom of God." In the 
afternoon he attended services in St. Paul's Cathedral, and the an- 
them, to his highly wrought imagination, seemed a repetition of the 
same hope. The sequel may be told in his own words. "In the 
evening I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street, 
where one was reading Luther's preface to the Epistle to the 
Romans. About a quarter before nine, while he was describing 
the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, 
I felt my heart strangely warmed, I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ 
alone, for salvation, and an assurance was given me that he had 
taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin 
and death. I began to pray with all my might for those who had 
in a more especial manner despitefully used me and persecuted me. 
I then testified openly to all,. what I now first felt in my heart." . . . 

§ 3. The Methodist Missionaries at Work 

Having rid himself of harassing doubts on cardinal points of 
his religious faith, John Wesley became a fervent preacher, em- 
phasizing salvation through faith in Christ, personal relations of 
believer and God, and definite conversion. He preached in the 
churches which were open to him and soon roused violent opposi- 
tion by the fervor of his declamation. He was soon joined by 



John Wesley and Methodism 483 

Whitefield and his brother Charles Wesley, and the three, with the 
followers who soon gathered about them, began the Herculean task 
of rousing all England to a new interpretation of religious life. 

The leaders of the movement became the most active of mission- 
aries. Without any fixed parishes they wandered from place to 
place, proclaiming their new doctrine in every pulpit to which 
they were admitted, and they speedily awoke a passionate enthusi- 
asm and a bitter hostility in the Church. Nothing, indeed, could 
appear more irregular to the ordinary parochial clergyman than 
these itinerant ministers, who broke away violently from the 
settled habits of their profession, who belonged to and worshipped 
in small religious societies that bore a suspicious resemblance to 
conventicles, and whose whole tone and manner of preaching were 
utterly unlike anything to which he was accustomed. They taught, 
in language of the most vehement emphasis, as the cardinal tenet 
of Christianity, the doctrine of a new birth in a form which was 
altogether novel to their hearers. They were never weary of urging 
that all men are in a condition of damnation who have not expe- 
rienced a sudden, violent, and supernatural change, or of in- 
veighing against the clergy for their ignorance of the very essence 
of Christianity. 

"Tillotson," in the words of Whitefield, "knew no more about 
true Christianity than Mahomet." The Whole Duty of Man, 
which was the most approved devotional manual of the time, was 
pronounced by the same preacher, on account of the stress it laid 
upon good works, to have "sent thousands to hell." The Metho- 
dist preacher came to an Anglican parish in the spirit, and with 
the language, of a missionary going to the most ignorant heathen ; 
and he asked the clergyman of the parish to lend him his pulpit, 
in order that he might instruct the parishioners — perhaps for the 
first time — in the true Gospel of Christ. It is not surprising that 
the clergy should have resented such a movement, and the manner 
of the missionary was as startling as his matter. The sermons 
of the time were, as I have said, almost always written, and the 
prevailing taste was cold, polished, and fastidious. 

The new preachers preached extempore, with the most intense 
fervor of language and gesture, and usually with a complete dis- 
regard of the conventionalities of their profession. Wesley fre- 
quently mounted the pulpit without even knowing from what text 
he would preach, believing that when he opened the Bible at ran- 
dom the Divine Spirit would guide him infallibly in his choice. 
The oratory of Whitefield was so impassioned that the preacher was 



484 English Historians 

sometimes scarcely able to proceed for his tears, while half the 
audience were convulsed with sobs. The love of order, routine, 
and decorum, which was the strongest feeling in the clerical mind, 
was violently shocked. The regular congregation was displaced 
by an agitated throng, who had never before been seen within the 
precincts of the Church. The usual quiet worship was disturbed 
by violent enthusiasm or violent opposition, by hysterical parox- 
ysms of devotion or remorse, and when the preacher had left 
the parish he seldom failed to leave behind him the elements of 
agitation and division. . . . 

The success of Methodism depended upon the zeal and abilities 
of its leaders, upon the evangelical doctrines which they had re- 
vived, and which were peculiarly fitted to exercise a deep influence 
upon the people, and upon the institution of field-preaching, which 
brought those doctrines before vast multitudes who had scarcely be- 
fore come into any contact with religion. The great difficulty was 
the small number of the teachers and the general hostility of the 
clergy, but this was remedied in the beginning of 1741 by the 
institution of lay preachers. Nelson and Maxfield were the two 
earliest. They had begun preaching in the preceding year without 
authorization and apparently without concert, under the impulse 
of an overpowering missionary enthusiasm ; and it was only very 
reluctantly, and chiefly in obedience to the advice of his mother, 
that Wesley consented to sanction the step. 

From the time of the institution of lay preachers, Methodism 
became in a great degree independent of the Established Church. 
Its chapels multiplied in the great towns, and its itinerant mission- 
aries penetrated to the most secluded districts. They were accus- 
tomed to preach in fields and gardens, in streets and lecture-rooms, 
in market-places and churchyards. On one occasion we find 
Whitefield at a fair mounting a stage which had been erected for 
some wrestlers, and there denouncing the pleasures of the world ; 
on another, preaching among the mountebanks at Moorfields ; on 
a third, attracting around his pulpit ten thousand of the spectators 
at a race course; on a fourth, standing beside the gallows at an 
execution to speak of death and of eternity. Wesley, when ex- 
cluded from the pulpit of Epworth, delivered some of his most 
impressive sermons in the churchyard, standing on his father's 
tomb. Howell Harris, the apostle of Wales, encountering a party 
of mountebanks, sprang into their midst exclaiming in a solemn 
voice "Let us pray," and then proceeded to thunder forth the 
judgments of the Lord. Rowland Hill was accustomed to visit 



John Wesley and Methodism 485 

the great towns on market-day in order that he might address the 
people in the market-place, and to go from fair to fair preaching 
among the revellers from his favorite text, "Come out from 
among them." 

§ 4. Opposition to the Missionaries 

In this manner the Methodist preachers came in contact with 
the most savage elements of the population, and there were few 
forms of mob violence they did not experience. In 1741 one of 
their preachers named Seward, after repeated ill-treatment in Wales, 
was at last struck on the head while preaching at Monmouth, and 
died of the blow. In a riot, while Wheatley was preaching at 
Norwich, a poor woman with child perished from the kicks and 
blows of the mob. At Wednesbury — a little town in Stafford- 
shire — then very famous for its cock fights, numerous houses 
were wrecked, the Methodists were stoned, beaten with cudgels, 
or dragged through the public kennels. Women were atrociously 
abused. The leaders of the mob declared their intention to de- 
stroy every Methodist in the county. Wesley himself appeared in 
the town, and the rioters speedily surrounded the house where he 
was staying. With the placid courage that never deserted him in 
danger, he descended alone and unarmed into their midst. His 
perfect calmness and his singularly venerable appearance quelled 
the most noisy, and he succeeded by a few well-chosen words in 
producing a sudden reaction. His captors, however, insisted on 
his accompanying them to a neighboring justice, who exhorted 
them to disperse in peace. The night had now fallen, and Wesley 
was actually returning to Wednesbury protected by a portion of 
the very crowd which had attacked him, when a new mob poured 
in from an adjoining village. He was seized by the hair and 
dragged through the streets. Some struck at him with cudgels. 
Many cried to knock out his brains and kill him at once. A river 
was flowing near, and he imagined that they would throw him into 
the water. Yet in that dreadful moment his self-possession never 
failed him. He uttered in loud and solemn tones a prayer to God. 
He addressed those who were nearest him with all the skill that 
a consummate knowledge of the popular character could supply, 
and he speedily won over to his side some of the most powerful of 
the leaders. Gradually the throng paused, wavered, divided; 
and Wesley returned almost uninjured to his house. To a similar 
courage he owed his life at Bolton, when the house where he was 



486 English Historians 

preaching was attacked, and at last burst open, by a furious crowd 
thirsting for his life. Again and again he preached, like the other 
leaders of the movement, in the midst of showers of stones or tiles 
or rotten eggs. The fortunes of his brother were little different. 
At Cardiff, when he was preaching, women were kicked and their 
clothes set on fire by fire-works. At St. Ives and in the neighbor- 
ing villages the congregations were attacked with cudgels, and 
everything in the room where they were assembled was shattered to 
atoms. At Devizes a water engine played upon the house where 
he was staying. His horses were seized. The house of one of his 
supporters was ransacked, and bull dogs were let loose upon him. 
At Dublin Whiteneld was almost stoned to death. At Exeter 
he was stoned in the very presence of the bishop. At Plymouth 
he was violently assaulted and his life seriously threatened by a 
naval officer. . . . 

§ 5. Methodism and Worldly Things 

In the intense religious enthusiasm that was generated, many of 
the ties of life were snapped in twain. Children treated with con- 
tempt the commands of their parents, students the rules of their 
colleges, clergymen the discipline of their Church. The whole 
structure of society, and almost all the amusements of life, appeared 
criminal. The fairs, the mountebanks, the public rejoicings of 
the people, were all Satanic. It was sinful for a woman to wear 
any gold ornament or any brilliant dress. It was even sinful for 
a man to exercise the common prudence of laying by a certain 
portion of his income. When Whiteneld proposed to a lady to 
marry him, he thought it necessary to say, "I bless God, if I know 
anything of my own heart, I am free from that foolish passion 
which the world calls love. I trust I love you only for God, and 
desire to be joined to you only by His commands, and for His sake." 
It is perhaps not very surprising that Whitefield's marriage, like 
that of Wesley, proved very unhappy. Theatres and the reading 
of plays were absolutely condemned, and Methodists employed 
all their influence with the authorities to prevent the erection of 
the former. It seems to have been regarded as a divine judgment 
that once, when Macbeth was being acted at Drury Lane, a real 
thunderstorm mingled with the mimic thunder in the witch scene. 
Dancing was, if possible, even worse than the theatre. " Dancers," 
said Whitefield, "please the devil at every step," and it was said 
that his visit to a town usually put "a stop to the dancing-school, 



John Wesley and Methodism 487 

the assemblies, and every pleasant thing." He made it his mis- 
sion to "bear testimony against the detestable diversions of this 
generation," and he declared that no " recreations, considered as 
such, can be innocent." A poor Kingswood collier was noted 
for his skill in playing the violin. He passed under Methodist 
influence, and at once consigned his instrument to the flames. 
Wesley was a man of powerful intellect and cultivated taste, yet 
we find him objecting to the statues at Stourton, among other 
reasons, " because I cannot admire the images of devils; and we 
know the gods of the heathens are but devils," and his only com- 
ment upon the treasures of art and nature recently amassed in 
the British Museum was "What account will a man give to the 
Judge of quick and dead for a life spent in collecting all these?" 
But perhaps the most striking illustration of this side of Metho- 
dist teaching is furnished by the rules he drew up for the school 
which he founded at Kingswood. The little children rose every 
morning, winter and summer, at four, and were directed in the 
first place to spend nearly an hour in private devotions. "As 
we have no playdays," he adds, "the school being taught every 
day in the year but Sunday, so neither do we allow any time for 
play on any day ; he that plays when he is a child will play when 
he is a man." . . . 

§ 6. Wesley and Snpernaturalism 

In all matters relating to Satanic interference, Wesley was es- 
pecially credulous. The abolition of the laws against witchcraft, 
which closed the fountain of an incalculable amount of undeserved 
suffering, would probably not have taken place without a violent 
struggle if the Methodist movement had had an earlier develop- 
ment. Wesley again and again reiterated, with the utmost em- 
phasis, his belief in witchcraft, and again and again attributed its 
downfall to religious scepticism. "It is true likewise," he wrote, 
"that the English in general, and indeed most of the men of learn- 
ing in Europe, have given up all accounts of witches and appari- 
tions as mere old wives' fables. I am sorry for it, and I willingly 
take this opportunity of entering my solemn protest against this 
violent compliment which so. many that believe the Bible pay to 
those who do not believe it. I owe them no such service. I take 
knowledge that these are at the bottom of the outcry which has 
been raised, and with such insolence spread throughout the nation, 
in direct opposition not only to the Bible, but to the suffrages of 



488 English Historians 

the wisest and best men of all ages and nations. They well know 
(whether Christians know it or not) that the giving up witchcraft 
is in effect giving up the Bible. I cannot give up to all the 
Deists in Great Britain the existence of witchcraft till I give up 
the credit of all history, sacred and profane." He had no doubt 
that the physical contortions into which so many of his hearers fell 
were due to the direct agency of Satan, who tore the converts as 
they were coming to Christ. He had himself seen men and women 
who were literally possessed by devils ; he had witnessed forms of 
madness which were not natural, but diabolical, and he had ex- 
perienced in his own person the hysterical affections which resulted 
from supernatural agency. 

On the other hand, if Satanic agencies continually convulsed 
those who were coming to the faith, divine judgments as frequently 
struck down those who opposed it. Every illness, every misfor- 
tune that befell an opponent was believed to be supernatural. 
Molther, the Moravian minister shortlv after the Methodists had 
separated from the Moravians, was seized with a passing illness. 
"I believe," wrote Wesley, "it was the hand of God that was upon 
him." Numerous cases were cited of sudden and fearful judg- 
ments which fell upon the adversaries of the cause. A clergyman 
at Bristol, standing up to preach against the Methodists, "was 
suddenly seized with a rattling in his throat, attended with a hide- 
ous groaning," and on the next Sunday he died. At Todmorden 
a minister was struck with a violent fit of palsy immediately after 
preaching against the Methodists. At Enniscorthy a clergyman, 
having preached for some time against the Methodists, deferred the 
conclusion of his discourse to the following Sunday. Next morn- 
ing he was raging mad, imagined that devils were about him, "and 
not long after, without showing the least sign of hope, he went to 
his account." At Kingswood a man began a vehement invective 
against Wesley and Methodism. "In the midst he was struck 
raving mad." A woman, seeing a crowd waiting for Wesley at 
a church door, exclaimed, "They are waiting for their God." 
She at once fell senseless to the ground and next day expired. "A 
party of young men rowed up to Richmond to disturb the sermons 
of Rowland Hill. The boat sank and all of them were drowned." 
At Sheffield the captain of a gang who had long troubled the field 
preachers was bathing with his companions. "Another dip," 
he said, "and then for a bit of sport with the Methodists." He 
dived, struck his head against a stone, and appeared no more. . . . 



John Wesley and Methodism 489 



§ 7. Wesley as a Man 

Few things in ecclesiastical history are more striking than the 
energy and the success with which John Wesley propagated his 
opinions. He was gifted with a frame of iron and with spirits 
that never flagged. "I do not remember," he wrote, when an 
old man, "to have felt lowness of spirits for a quarter of an hour 
since I was born." He was accustomed to attribute, probably 
with much reason, to his perpetual journeys on horseback, the 
almost superhuman flow of health and vigor which he enjoyed. 
He lived eighty-seven years, and continued his efforts to the very 
close. He rose long before daybreak. He preached usually at five 
o'clock in the morning. When he was eighty-five he once de- 
livered more than eighty sermons in eight weeks. In the very last 
year of his life he went on a missionary journey to Scotland, and 
on one occasion travelled seventy miles in a single day. During 
the greater part of his career, he was accustomed to preach about 
800 sermons a year, and it was computed that in the fifty years of 
his itinerant life he travelled a quarter of a million of miles, and 
preached more than 40,000 sermons. Like Whitefield, he had the 
power of riveting the attention of audiences of 8000, 10,000, and 
sometimes even 20,000 souls, and, like Whitefield, a great part of 
his success depended on the topics he habitually employed; but 
in other respects his sermons bore no resemblance to the impas- 
sioned harangues of his great colleague. His style was simple, 
terse, colloquial, abounding in homely images, characterized above 
all things by its extreme directness, by the manifest and complete 
subordination of all other considerations to the one great end of 
impressing his doctrines on his hearers, animated by a tone of 
intense and penetrating sincerity that found its way to the hearts 
of thousands. He possessed to the highest degree that controlled 
and reasoning fanaticism which is one of the most powerful agents 
in moving the passions of men. While preaching doctrines of 
the wildest extravagance, while representing himself as literally 
inspired, and his hearers as surrounded by perpetual miracles, his 
manner and his language were always those of a scholar and a gen- 
tleman, — calm, deliberate, and self-possessed. He was always 
dressed with a scrupulous neatness. His countenance, to the very 
close of his life, was singularly beautiful and expressive, and in 
his old age his long white hair added a peculiar venerableness to 
his appearance. Great natural knowledge of men, improved by 



490 English Historians 

extraordinary experience, gave him an almost unrivalled skill in 
dealing with the most various audiences, and the courage with 
which he never failed to encounter angry mobs, as well as the quiet 
dignity of manner which never forsook him, added greatly to the . 
effects of his preaching. 

His administrative powers were probably still greater than his 
power as a preacher. Few tasks are more difficult than the organi- 
zation into a permanent body of half-educated men, intoxicated 
with the wildest religious enthusiasm, believing themselves to be 
all inspired by the Holy Ghost, and holding opinions that run 
perilously near the abyss of Antinomianism. Wesley accomplished 
the task with an admirable mixture of tact, firmness, and gentle- 
ness, and the skill with which he framed the Methodist organiza- 
tion is sufficiently shown by its later history. Like all men with 
extraordinary administrative gifts, he had a great love of power, 
and this fact renders peculiarly honorable his evident reluctance 
to detach himself from the discipline of his Church. 

He has, it is true, no title to be regarded as a great thinker. His 
mind had not much originality or speculative power, and his 
leading tenets placed him completely out of harmony with the 
higher intellect of his time. Holding the doctrine of a particular 
Providence in such a sense as to believe that the physical phenom- 
ena of the universe were constantly changed for human convenience 
and at human prayers, he could have little sympathy with scien- 
tific thought. Assuming as axioms the inspiration of every word 
of the Bible and his own inspiration in interpreting it, throwing the 
whole weight of religious proof upon what he termed " a new class of 
senses opened in the soul to be the avenues of the invisible world, 
the evidence of things not seen, as the bodily senses are of visible 
things," he was simply indifferent to the gravest historical, criti- 
cal, and ethical questions that were discussed about him, and diffi- 
culties that troubled some of the greatest thinkers were impercep- 
tible for him. No class of opinions are less likely to commend 
themselves to a judicial and critical intellect than those which he 
embraced. His mind was incapable of continued doubt. His 
credulity and confidence on some subjects were unbounded, and 
his judgments of men were naturally strongly biassed by his theo- 
logical views. Thus Hume appeared to him merely as "the most 
insolent despiser of truth and virtue that ever appeared in the 
world," and he regarded Beattie as incomparably superior both 
as a writer and a reasoner. Leibnitz he pronounced to be one of 
the poorest writers he had ever read. He could not pardon Reid 



John Wesley and Methodism 491 

for having spoken respectfully of Rousseau, or Robertson for 
having referred without censure to Lord Kames, or Smollett and 
Guthrie for having treated witchcraft as a superstition. Still 
even the literary side of his character is by no means contemptible. 
He was an indefatigable and very skilful controversialist, a volumi- 
nous writer, and a still more voluminous editor. His writings, 
though they are certainly not distinguished either by originality 
of thought or by eloquence of expression, are always terse, well 
reasoned, full of matter and meaning. Unlike a large proportion 
of his followers, he had no contempt for human learning, and in 
spite of the incessant activity of his career he found time for much 
and various reading. He was accustomed to read history, poetry, 
and philosophy on horseback, and one of the charms of his jour- 
nals is the large amount of shrewd literary criticism they contain. 
His many-sided activity was displayed in the most various fields, 
and his keen eye was open to every form of abuse. At one time 
we find him lamenting the glaring inequalities of political represen- 
tation ; that Old Sarum without house or inhabitant should send 
two members to Parliament; that Looe, "a town nearly half as 
large as Islington," should send four members, while every county 
in North Wales sent only one. At another he dilated on the costly 
diffusiveness of English legal documents, or on the charlatanry 
and inconsistency of English medicine. He set up a dispensary, 
and, though not a qualified practitioner, he gratuitously admin- 
istered medicine to the poor. He was a strong advocate of inocu- 
lation, which was then coming into use, and of the application of 
electricity to medicine, and he attempted, partly on sanitary 
and partly on economical grounds, to discourage the use of tea 
among the poor. He was among the first to reprobate the horrors 
of the slave trade, to call attention to the scandalous condition of 
the jails, to make collections for relieving the miserable destitu- 
tion of the French prisoners of war. He supported with the whole 
weight of his influence the Sunday-school movement. He made 
praiseworthy efforts to put down among his followers that political 
corruption which was perhaps the most growing vice of English 
society. He also took an active, though a very unfortunate part 
in some of the political questions of the day. He wrote against 
the concession of relief to the Catholics ; and during the American 
struggle he threw into a more popular form the chief arguments 
in Dr. Johnson's pamphlet against the Americans, and had prob- 
ably a considerable influence in forming the public opinion hostile 
to all concession 



CHAPTER III 

PERSONAL GOVERNMENT OF GEORGE III 

Durlng the early years of his reign, George III demonstrated 
clearly the immense power which the crown could still wield in 
government by means of personal influence, bribery, appoint- 
ments to government positions, and elevation to the peerage. He 
resented control by ministers depending for their authority upon 
the House of Commons, he narrowly watched the conduct of 
debates in the Parliament, and though compelled for a time to 
accept ministers whom he disliked, he steadily worked to increase 
his control in Commons by methods which May describes in an 
interesting fashion in the first volume of his Constitutional History 
of England. 

§ i. The King's Friends and Royal Intervention in Parliamen- 
tary Affairs l 

The king's friends became more numerous and acted under 
better discipline. Some held offices in the government or house- 
hold, yet looked for instructions, not to ministers, but to the king. 
Men enjoying obscure, but lucrative appointments, in the gift of 
the king himself and other members of the royal family, voted at 
the bidding of the court. But the greater number of the king's 
friends were independent members of Parliament, whom various 
motives had attracted to his cause. Many were influenced by 
high notions of prerogative, — by loyalty, by confidence in the judg- 
ment and honesty of their sovereign, and personal attachment 
to his Majesty, and many by hopes of favor and advancement. 
They formed a distinct patty, and their coherence was secured 
by the same causes which generally contribute to the formation 

1 May, Constitutional History of England, Vol. I, pp. 35 ff. By per- 
mission of Longmans, Green, & Company, Publishers. 

492 



Personal Government of George III 493 

of party ties. But their principles and position were inconsistent 
with constitutional government. Their services to ths king were 
no longer confined to counsel or political intrigue; but were or- 
ganized so as to influence the deliberations of Parliament. And 
their organization for such a purpose marked a further advance in 
the unconstitutional policy of the court. 

The king continued personally to direct the measures of his 
ministers, more particularly in the disputes with the American V 
colonies, which, in his opinion, involved the rights and honor 
of his crown. He was resolutely opposed to the repeal of the 
Stamp Act, which ministers thought necessary for the conciliation 
of the colonies. He resisted this measure in council ; but finding 
ministers resolved to carry it, he opposed them in Parliament by 
the authority of his name, and by his personal influence over a con- 
siderable body of Parliamentary adherents. The' king affected, 
indeed, to support' his ministers, and to decline the use of his name 
in opposing them. "Lord Harcourt suggested, at a distance, that 
his Majesty might make his sentiments known, which might pre- 
vent the repeal of the act, if his ministers should push that measure. 
The king seemed averse to that, said he would never influence 
people in their Parliamentary opinions, and that he had promised 
to support his ministers." But however the king may have affected 
to deprecate the use of his name, it was unquestionably used by 
his friends, and while he himself admitted the unconstitutional 
character of such a proceeding, it found a defender in Lord 
Mansfield. In discussing this matter with the king, his lordship 
argued "that, though it would be unconstitutional, to endeavor 
by his Majesty's name to carry questions in Parliament, yet where 
the lawful rights of the king and Parliament were to be asserted 
and maintained, he thought the making his Majesty's opinion in 
support of those rights to be known, was fit and becoming." In 
order to counteract this secret influence, Lord Rockingham ob- 
tained the king's written consent to the passing of the bill. 

Ministers had to contend against another difficulty, which the 
tactics of the court had created. Not only were they opposed by 
independent members of the court party, but members holding 
office — upon whose support ministers were justified in relying — 
were encouraged to oppose them, and retained their offices while 
voting in the ranks of the opposition. The king, who had punished 
with so much severity any opposition to measures which he ap- 
proved, now upheld and protected those placemen, who opposed 
the ministerial measures to which he himself objected. In vain 



494 English Historians 

ministers remonstrated against their conduct, the king was ready 
with excuses and promises, but his chosen band were safe from the 
indignation of the government. Nor was their opposition confined 
to the repeal of the Stamp Act, — a subject on which they might 
have affected to entertain conscientious scruples ; but it was vexa- 
tiously continued against the general measures of the adminis- 
tration. Well might Mr. Burke term this "an opposition of a 
new and singular character, — an opposition of placemen and 
pensioners." . . ". 

The king, meanwhile, had resolved to overthrow the Rocking- 
ham ministry, which was on every account distasteful to him. He 
| disapproved their liberal policy; he was jealous of their powerful 
party, which he was bent on breaking up; and, above all, he 
resented their independence. He desired ministers to execute his 
will, and these men and their party were the obstacles to the 
cherished object of his ambition. 

§ 2. Chatham and Party Government 

At length, in July, 1766, they were ungraciously dismissed; and 
his Majesty now expected, from the hands of Mr. Pitt, an admin- 
istration better suited to his own views and policy. Mr. Pitt's 
greatness had naturally pointed him out as the fittest man for such 
a task; and there were other circumstances which made him per- 
sonally acceptable to the king. Haughty as was the demeanor of 
that distinguished man in the senate, and among his equals, his 
bearing in the royal presence was humble and obsequious. The 
truth of Mr. Burke's well-known sarcasm, that "the least peep 
into that closet intoxicates him, and will to the end of his life," 
was recognized by all his contemporaries. A statesman with at 
least the outward qualities of a courtier, was likely to give the 
king some repose, after his collisions with the last two ministries. 
He now undertook to form an administration, under the Duke of 
Grafton, with the office of privy seal, and a seat in the Upper 
House, as Earl of Chatham. 

For another reason also, Lord Chatham was acceptable to the 
king. They agreed, though for different reasons, in the policy of 
breaking up party connections. This was now the settled object 
of the king, which he pursued with unceasing earnestness. In 
writing to Lord Chatham, July 29, 1766, he said, "I know the 
Earl of Chatham will zealously give his aid toward destroying all 
party distinctions, and restoring that subordination to government 



Personal Government of George III 495 

which can alone preserve that inestimable blessing, liberty, from s/* 
degenerating into licentiousness." Again, December 2, 1766, he 
wrote to the Earl of Chatham, "To rout out the present method of 
parties banding together can only be obtained by withstanding 
their unjust demands, as well as the engaging able men, be their 
private connections where they will." And again, on the 25th of 
June, 1767, "I am thoroughly resolved to encounter any difficul- 
ties rather than yield to faction." 

By this policy the king hoped to further his cherished scheme ^ 
of increasing his own personal influence. To overcome the Whig 
connection was to bring into office the friends of Lord Bute and 
the court party who were subservient to his views. Lord Chat- 
ham adopted the king's policy for a very different purpose. Though 
in outward observances a courtier, he was a constitutional states- 
man, opposed to government by prerogative and court influence. 
His career had been due to his own genius, independent of party, 
and superior to it ; he had trusted to his eloquence, his statesman- 
ship, and popularity. And now, by breaking up parties, he hoped 
to rule over them all. His project, however, completely failed. 
Having offended and exasperated the Whigs, he found himself 
at the head of an administration composed of the king's friends, 
who thwarted him, and of other discordant elements, over which 
he had no control. 

He discovered, when it was too late, that the king had been more 
sagacious than himself, and that while his own power and con- 
nections had crumbled away, the court party had obtained a dan- 
gerous ascendency. Parties had been broken up, and prerogative 
triumphed. The leaders of parties had been reduced to insignifi- 
cance, while the king directed public affairs according to his own 
will and upon principles dangerous to public liberty. According 
to Burke, when Lord Chatham "had accomplished his scheme of 
administration, he was no longer minister." 

Meanwhile, other circumstances contributed to increase the in- 
fluence of the king. Much of Lord Chatham's popularity had 
been sacrificed by the acceptance of a peerage, and his personal 
influence was diminished by his removal from the House of Com- 
mons, where he had been paramount. His holding so obscure a 
place as that of privy seal further detracted from his weight as a 
minister. His melancholy prostration soon afterward increased 
the feebleness and disunion of the administration. Though his 
was its leading mind, for months he was incapacitated from attend- 
ing to any business. He even refused an interview to the Duke of 



496 English Historians 

Grafton, the premier, and to General Conway, though commis- 
sioned by the king to confer with him. It is not surprising that 
the Duke of Grafton should complain of the languor under which 
''every branch of the administration labored from his absence." 
Yet the king, writing to Lord Chatham, January 23, 1768, to dis- 
suade him from resigning the privy seal, said, "Though confined 
to your house, your name has been sufficient to enable my ad- 
ministration to proceed." At length, however, in October, 1768, 
completely broken down, he resigned his office, and withdrew from 
the administration. 

§ 3. The Accession of Lord North and Royal Intervention 

The absence of Lord Chatham, and the utter disorganization of 
the ministry, left the king free to exercise his own influence, and 
to direct the policy of the country without control. Had Lord 
Chatham been there, the ministry would have had a policy of its 
own ; now it had none, and the Duke of Grafton and Lord North 
\y — partly from indolence and partly from facility — consented to 
follow the stronger will of their sovereign. 

On his side, the king took advantage of the disruption of party 
ties, which he had taken pains to promote. In the absence of 
distinctive principles and party leaders, members of Parliament 
were exposed to the direct influence of the crown. According to 
Horace Walpole, "everybody ran to court, and voted for what- 
ever the court desired." The main object of the king in breaking 
up parties had thus been secured. 

On the resignation of the Duke of Grafton, the king's ascendency 
in the council of his ministers was further increased by the accession 
of Lord North to the chief direction of public affairs. That min- 
ister, by principle a Tory and favorable to prerogative — ■ in char- 
acter indolent and good-tempered, — and personally attached to the 
king — yielded up his own opinions and judgment, and for years 
consented to be the passive instrument of the royal will. The 
persecution of Wilkes, the straining of Parliamentary privilege, 
and the coercion of America, were the disastrous fruits of the court 
policy. Throughout this administration, the king staked his per- 
sonal credit upon the success of his measures, and regarded oppo- 
sition to his minister as an act of disloyalty, and their defeat as an 
affront to himself. 

In 1770 Lord Chatham stated in Parliament, that since the king's 
accession there had been no original {i.e. independent) minister, 



Personal Government of George III 497 

and examples abound of the king's personal participation in every 
political event of this period. 

While the opposition were struggling to reverse the proceedings 
of the House of Commons against Wilkes, and Lord Chatham 
was about to move an address for dissolving Parliament, the king's £/' 
resentment knew no bounds. In conversations with General 
Conway, at this time, he declared he would abdicate his crown 
rather than comply with this address. "Yes," said the king, 
laying his hand on his sword, "I will have recourse to this, sooner 
than yield to a dissolution of Parliament." And opinions have not 
been wanting that the king was actually prepared to resist what he 
deemed an invasion of his prerogative by military force. 

On the 26th February, 1772, while the Royal Marriage Bill was 
pending in the House of Lords, the king thus wrote to Lord North : 
"I expect every nerve to be strained to carry the bill. It is not 
a question relating to administration, but personally to myself; 
therefore I have a right to expect a hearty support from every one 
in my service, and I shall remember defaulters." Again, on the 
14th March, 1772, he wrote: " I wish a list could be prepared of those 
that went away, and of those that deserted to the minority (on 
division in the committee). That would be a rule for my conduct 
in the drawing-room to-morrow." Again, in another letter, he 
said: "I am greatly incensed at the presumption of Charles Fox, 
in forcing you to vote with him last night. ... I hope you will 
let him know that you are not insensible of his conduct toward 
you." And the king's confidence in his own influence over the 
deliberations of Parliament appears from another letter, on the 
26th June, 1774, where he said, "I hope the crown will always be 
able, in either house of Parliament, to throw out a bill, but I shall 
never consent to use any expression which tends to establish, that 
at no time the right of the crown to dissent is to be used." 

The king watched not only how members spoke and voted, or 
whether they abstained from voting ; but even if they were silent, 
when he had expected them to speak. No "whipper-in" from the 
Treasury could have been more keen or full of expedients in 
influencing the votes of members in critical divisions. He was 
ready, also, to take advantage of the absence of opponents. Hear- 
ing that Mr. Fox was going to Paris, he wrote to Lord North, on 
the 15th November, 1776, "Bring as much forward as you can 
before the recess, as real business is never so well considered as 
when the attention of the House is not taken up with noisy 
declamation." . . . 

2K 



V 



498 English Historians 



§ 4. Failure of Personal Government 

Not without many affronts, and much unpopularity, the king 
and his minister long triumphed over all opposition in Parlia- 
ment, but in 1778 the signal failure of their policy, the crisis in 
American affairs, and the impending war with France obliged 
them to enter into negotiations with Lord Chatham for the ad- 
mission of that statesman and some of the leaders of the opposition 
into the ministry. The king needed their assistance, but was 
"resolved not to adopt their policy. He would accept them as 
instruments of his own will but not as responsible ministers. If 
their counsels should prevail, he would himself be humiliated and 
disgraced. 

In a letter to Lord North, on the 15th March, 1778, the king 
says, "Honestly, I would rather lose the crown I now wear than 
bear the ignominy of possessing it under their shackles." And, 
again, on the 17th March, he writes: "I am still ready to accept 
any part of them that will come to the assistance of my present 
efficient ministers; but, whilst any ten men in the kingdom will 
stand by me I will not give myself up to bondage. My dear 
Lord, I will rather risk my crown than do what I think personally 
disgraceful. It is impossible this nation should not stand by me. 
If they will not, they shall have another king, for I never will put 
my hand to what will make me miserable to the last hour of my 
life." Again, on the 18th, he writes, " Rather than be shackled 
by those desperate men (if the nation will not stand by me), I 
will rather see any form of government introduced into this island, 
and lose my crown, rather than wear it as a disgrace." The fail- 
ure of these negotiations, followed by the death of Lord Chatham, 
left unchanged the unfortunate administration of Lord North. 

Overtures, indeed, were made to the Whig leaders, to join a new 
ministry under Lord Weymouth, which were, perhaps unwisely, 
declined, and henceforth the king was resolved to admit none to 
his councils without exacting a pledge of compliance with his 
wishes. Thus, on the 4th February, 1779, writing to Lord North, he 
says, "You may now sound Lord Howe; but, before I name him 
to preside at the Admiralty Board, I must expect an explicit decla- 
ration that he will zealously concur in prosecuting the war in all 
the quarters of the globe." Again, on the 22nd June, 1779, he 
writes, "Before I will hear of any man's readiness to come into 
office, I will expect to see it signed under his own hand, that he 



Personal Government of George III 499 

is resolved to keep the empire entire, and that no troops shall 
consequently be withdrawn from thence (i.e. America), nor inde- 
pendence ever allowed." It was not without reason that this 
deplorable contest was called the king's war. 

At this time it was openly avowed in the House of Commons by 
Lord George Germaine, that the king was his own minister, and 
Mr. Fox lamented "that his Majesty was his own unadvised min- 
ister." Nor was it unnatural that the king should expect such 
submission from other statesmen, when his first minister was 
carrying out a policy of which he disapproved, but .wanted reso- 
lution to resist, and when Parliament had hitherto supported his 
ill-omened measures. Lord North did not conceal his own views 
concerning the continuance of the American war. In announcing 
to the king the resignation of Lord Gower, who was of opinion that 
the contest "must end in ruin to his Majesty and the country," 
he said, "in the argument Lord North had certainly one disad- 
vantage, which is that he held in his heart, and has held for three 
years past, the same opinion as Lord Gower." Yet the minister 
submitted to the stronger will of his royal master. 

Again, however, the king was reduced to treat with the opposi- 
tion ; but was not less resolute in his determination that no change 
of ministers should affect the policy of his measures. On the 
3rd December, 1779, he was prevailed upon to give Lord Thurlow 
authority to open a negotiation with the leaders of the opposition 
and expressed his willingness "to admit into his confidence and 
service any men of public spirit and talents who will join with 
part of the present ministry in forming one on a more enlarged 
scale, provided it be understood that every means are to be em- 
ployed to keep the empire entire, to prosecute the present just and 
unprovoked war in all its branches, with the utmost vigor, and that 
his Majesty's past measures be treated with proper respect." 
Finding the compliance of independent statesmen less ready than he 
desired, he writes to Lord Thurlow, on the 18th December : "From 
the cold disdain with which I am treated, it is evident to me what 
treatment I am to expect from the opposition, if I was to call them 
into my service. To obtain their support, I must deliver up my 
person, my principles, and my dominions into their hands." In 
other words, the king dreaded the admission of any ministers to 
his councils who claimed an independent judgment upon the policy 
for which they would become responsible. 



/ 



^00 English Historians 



§ 5. Protest against Royal Intervention 

In the meantime the increasing influence of the crown and the 
active personal exercise of its prerogatives were attracting the at- 
tention of the people and of Parliament. In the debate on the 
address at the opening of Parliament, on the 25th November, 1779, 
Mr. Fox said: "He saw very early indeed, in the present reign, 
the plan of government which had been laid down, and had since 
been invariably pursued in every department. It was not the 
mere rumor of the streets that the king was his own minister ; the 
fatal truth was evident, and had made itself evident in every cir- 
cumstance of the war carried on against America and the West 
Indies." This was denied by ministers; but evidence, not acces- 
sible to contemporaries, has since made his statement indisputable. 

Early in the following year numerous public meetings were 
held, associations formed, and petitions presented in favor of 
economic reforms, and complaining of the undue influence of the 
crown, and of the patronage and corruption by which it was main- 
tained. • It was for the redress of these grievances that Mr. Burke 
offered his celebrated scheme of economical reform. He con- 
fessed that the main object of this scheme was "the reduction of 
that corrupt influence which is itself the perennial spring of all 
prodigality and of all disorder, which loads us more than millions 
of debt, which takes away vigor from our arms, wisdom from our 
councils, and every shadow of authority and credit from the most 
venerable parts of our constitution." 

On the 6th April Mr. Dunning moved resolutions, in a committee 
of the whole Hcuse, founded upon these petitions. The first, which is 
memorable in political history, affirmed "that the influence of the 
crown has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished." 
The Lord Advocate, Mr. Dundas, endeavored to diminish the force 
of this resolution by the prefatory words, "that it is necessary to 
declare"; but Mr. Fox, on behalf of the opposition, at once as- 
sented to this amendment, and the resolution was carried by a 
majority of eighteen. A second resolution was agreed to, without 
a division, affirming the right of the House to correct abuses in the 
civtt list expenditure, and every other branch of the public revenue; 
and also a third, affirming "that it is the duty of this House to pro- 
vide, as far as may be, an immediate and effectual redress of the 
abuses complained of in the petitions presented to this House." 
The opposition, finding themselves in a majority, pushed forward 



Personal Government of George III 501 

their success. They would consent to no delay, and these reso- 
lutions were immediately reported and agreed to by the House. 
This debate was signalized by the opposition speech of Sir Fletcher 
Norton, the speaker, who bore his personal testimony to the in- 
creased and increasing influence of the crown. The king, writing 
to Lord North on the nth April concerning these obnoxious reso- 
lutions, said, "I wish I did not feel at whom they were personally 
levelled." 

The same matters were also debated, in this session, in the 
House of Lords. The debate on the Earl of Shelburne's motion, 
of the 8th February, for an inquiry into the public expenditure, 
brought out further testimonies to the influence of the crown. Of / 

these the most remarkable was given by the Marquis of Rock- 
ingham, who asserted that since the accession of the king there 
had been "a fixed determination to govern this country under the 
forms of law, through the influence of the crown." Everything 
within and without, whether in cabinet, Parliament, or elsewhere, 
carried about it the most unequivocal marks of such a system ; the 
whole economy of executive government, in all its branches, pro- 
claimed it, whether professional, deliberative, or official. The 
supporters of it in books, pamphlets, and newspapers avowed it, 
and defended it without reserve. It was early in the present 
reign promulgated as a court axiom, "that the power and influence 
of the crown alone were sufficient to support any set of men his 
Majesty might think proper to call to his councils." The fact 
bore evidence of its truth; for through the influence of the crown, 
majorities had been procured to support any men or any measures, 
which an administration, thus constituted, thought proper to dic- 
tate. 

This very motion provoked the exercise cf prerogative, in an 
arbitrary and offensive form, in order to influence the votes of 
peers, and to intimidate opponents. The Marquis of Car- 
marthen and the Earl of Pembroke had resigned their offices in 
the household, in order to give an independent vote. Before the 
former had voted, he received notice that he was dismissed from 
the lord-lieutenancy of the East Riding of the county of York; 
and soon after the latter had recorded his vote, he was dismissed , 
from the lord-lieutenancy of Wiltshire, an office which had been \/ 
held by his family, at different times, for centuries. This flagrant 
exercise of prerogative could not escape the notice of Parliament, 
and on the 6th March Lord Shelburne moved an address praying 
the king to acquaint the House whether he had been advised, and by 



502 English Historians 

whom, to dismiss these peers "from their employments, for their 
conduct in Parliament." The motion was negatived by a large 
majority; but the unconstitutional acts of the king were strongly 
condemned in debate, and again animadversions were made 
upon the influence of the crown, more especially in the admin- 
istration of the army and militia. 

On the meeting of Parliament, on the 27th November, 1781, 
amendments were moved in both houses, in answer to the king's 
speech, when strong opinions were expressed regarding the influ- 
ence of the crown, and the irregular and irresponsible system 
under which the government of the country was conducted. The 
Duke of Richmond said "that the country was governed by clerks 
— each minister confining himself to his own office — and, conse- 
quently, instead of responsibility, union of opinion, and concerted 
measures nothing was displayed but dissension, weakness, and cor- 
ruption." The "interior cabinet," he declared, had been the ruin 
of this country. The Marquis of Rockingham described the 
system of government pursued since the commencement of the 
reign as "a prospective system — a system of favoritism and 
secret influence." Mr. Fox imputed all the defeats and disasters 
of the American war to the influence of the crown. 

§ 6. Fall of Lord North 

The king was never diverted, by defeat and disaster, from his 
resolution to maintain the war with America, but the House of 
Commons was now determined upon peace, and a struggle ensued 
which was to decide the fate of the minister, and to overcome, 
by the power of Parliament, the stubborn will of the king. On 
the 22nd February, 1782, General Conway moved an address depre- 
cating the -continuance of the war, but was defeated by a majority 
of one. On the 27th he proposed another address with the same 
object. Lord North begged for a short respite; but an adjourn- 
ment being refused by a majority of nineteen, the motion was 
agreed to without a division. 

On the receipt of the king's answer, General Conway moved a 
resolution that "the House will consider as enemies to the king and 
country all who shall advise, or by any means attempt, the further 
prosecution of offensive war, for the purpose of reducing the re- 
volted colonies to obedience by force." In reply to this proposal, 
Lord North astonished the House by announcing, not that he pro- 
posed to resign on the reversal of the policy, to which he was 



Personal Government of George III 503 

pledged, but that he was prepared to give effect to the instructions 
of the House. Mr. Fox repudiated the principle of a minister 
remaining in office, to carry out the policy of his opponents, 
against his own judgment, and General Conway's resolution was 
agreed to. Lord North, however, persevered with his proposi- 
tions for peace, and declared his determination to retain office 
until the king should command him to resign, or the House should 
point out to him in the clearest manner the propriety of with- 
drawing. No time was lost in pressing him with the latter alter- 
native. On the 8th March a motion of Lord John Cavendish, charg- 
ing all the misfortunes of the war upon the incompetency of the 
ministers, was lost by a majority of ten. On the 15th Sir J. Rous 
moved that "the House could no longer repose confidence in the 
present ministers," and his motion was negatived by a majority 
of nine. On the 20th the assault was about to be repeated, when 
Lord North announced his resignation. 

The king had watched this struggle with great anxiety, as one 
personal to himself. Writing to Lord North on the 17th March, 
after the motion of Sir J. Rous, he said, "I am resolved not to 
throw myself into the hands of the opposition at all events, and 
shall certainly, if things go as they seem to tend, know what my con- 
science as well as honor dictates, as the only way left for me." 
He even desired the royal yacht to be prepared, and talked as if 
nothing were now left for him but to retire to Hanover. But it 
had become impossible to retain any longer in his service that 
"confidential minister," whom he had "always treated more as 
his friend than minister." By the earnest solicitations of the king, 
Lord North had been induced to retain office against his own wishes ; 
he had persisted in a policy of which he disapproved, and when 
forced to abandon it, he still held his ground, in order to protect the 
king from the intrusion of those whom his Majesty regarded as 
his personal enemies. He was now fairly driven from his post, 
and the king, appreciating the personal devotion of his minister, 
rewarded his zeal and fidelity with a munificent present from the 
privy purse. 

The king's correspondence with Lord North gives us a re- 
markable insight into the relations of his Majesty with that min- 
ister, and with the government of the country. Not only did he 
direct the minister in all important matters of foreign and domestic 
policy, but he instructed him as to the management of debates 
in Parliament, suggested what motions should be made or opposed, 
and how measures should be carried. He reserved to himself 



504 English Historians 

all the patronage ; he arranged the entire cast of the administra- 
tion; settled the relative places and pretensions of ministers of 
state, of law officers, and members of his household; nominated 
and promoted the English and Scotch judges, appointed and 
translated bishops, nominated deans, and dispensed other prefer- 
ments in the Church. He disposed of military governments, 
regiments, and commissions, and himself ordered the marching 
of troops. He gave or refused titles, honors, and pensions. All 
his directions were peremptory : Louis the Great himself could not 
have been more royal; he enjoyed the consciousness of power, and 
felt himself "every inch a king." 

Bibliographical Note 

Lecky, History of England in the Eighteenth Century, Vols. Ill and IV, 
consult table of contents on above topics. Stanhope (Lord Mahon), History 
of England from 1713 to 1783, consult table of contents. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 

The great religious and political revolutions which England had 
undergone since the Middle Ages had left the country still mediaeval 
in its main features. The English people continued to live, work, 
and travel in very much the same way as they had in the day of 
King John. If a larger portion of the people lived in towns than 
in that day, still they were not the factory towns which one sees now, 
but rather overgrown country villages. Over a vast portion of the 
country one could see traces of mediaeval economy in the primitive 
common field system of agriculture. Even those who were not 
engaged in tilling the soil were often not entirely divorced from it, 
but spent a portion of their time away from their industries work- 
ing in the fields. The majority of the people were as ignorant as 
they had been centuries before, and as excluded from the political 
life of the nation as the peasant in the day when Magna Carta 
was signed. Suddenly there was introduced a series of inventions 
which completely altered the old ways of living and working. The 
cottage workshops gave place to great factories in which were col- 
lected the thousands of workmen whose hand-instruments of pro- 
duction were rendered obsolete by the steam engine. Production 
which had hitherto been carried on for use or exchange in a re- 
stricted market gave place to production in which profit was the 
driving motive. The intellectual and economic rigidity of the 
Middle Ages was broken by steadily intensifying competition, shift- 
ing of population, and constant changes in technical processes. 
Two new classes sprang rapidly into existence, the owners of the 
new factories and the workers in them. This far-reaching revo- 
lution, whose undreamt-of possibilities are not yet realized, lies 

5°5 



506 English Historians 

at the bottom of the great political, reform, imperial, and literary 
movements of the nineteenth century. To study these without 
their economic foundations is to miss the underlying forces of 
modern history. 

§ i. The Opening of a New Era l 

The period, which opened with Arkwright's mechanical inven- 
tions, has been the commencement of a new era in the economic 
history, not only of England, but of the whole world. It marked 
one of the great stages in the growth of human power to master 
nature. The discovery of the New World, and of the sea route 
to India, had been events which gradually altered the whole 
method and scale on which European commerce was carried on. 
The application of water-power and of steam, to do the work 
which had been previously accomplished by human drudgery, is 
comparable with the commercial revolution of the sixteenth cen- 
tury, as a new departure of which we do. not even yet see the full 
significance. Physical forces have been utilized so as to aid man 
in his work ; and the introduction of machinery continues slowly, 
but surely, to revolutionize the habits and organizations of indus- 
trial life in all parts of the globe. Half-civilized and barbarous 
peoples are compelled to have recourse, as far as may be, to modern 
weapons and modern means of communication ; they cannot hold 
aloof, or deny themselves the use of such appliances. But the 
adoption of modern methods of production and traffic is hardly 
consistent with the maintenance of the old social order, in any 
country on this earth. 

England was the pioneer of the application of mechanism to in- 
dustry, and thus became the workshop of the world, so that other 
countries have been inspired by her example. The policy of 
endeavoring to retain the advantages of machinery for England 
alone was mooted, but never very seriously pursued, and it was 
definitely abandoned in 1825. The changes which have taken 
place in England, during the last hundred and thirty years, at 
least suggest the direction of the movements which may be ex- 
pected in other lands, as they are drawn more and more to adapt 
themselves to modern conditions. The time has not yet come to 
write the history of the industrial revolution in its broader aspects, 

1 Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce (1903), Vol. 
II, Part 2, pp. 609 ff. By permission of Dr. Cunningham and the Cam- 
bridge University Press. 



The Industrial Revolution 



507 



for we only know the beginning of the story; we can trace the 
origin and immediate results in England, but we cannot yet gauge 
its importance for the world as a whole. . 

§ 2. Reasons for English Leadership 

It was not an accident that England took the lead in this matter; 
the circumstances of the day afforded most favorable conditions 
for the successful introduction of new appliances. Inventions and 
discoveries often seem to be merely fortuitous; men are apt to 
regard the new machinery as the outcome of a special and uncon- 
trollable burst of inventive genius in the eighteenth century. But 
we are not forced to be content with such a meagre explanation. 
To point out that Arkwright and Watt were fortunate in the fact 
that the times were ripe for them, is not to detract from their 
merits. There had been many ingenious men from the time of 
William Lee and Dodo Dudley, but the conditions of their day 
were unfavorable to their success. The introduction of expensive 
implements, or processes, involves a large outlay; it is not worth 
while for any man, however energetic, to make the attempt, unless 
he has a considerable command of capital, and has access to large 
markets. In the eighteenth century these conditions were being 
more and more realized. The institution of the Bank of England, 
and of other banks, had given a great impulse to the formation of 
capital; and it was much more possible than it had ever been 
before for a capable man to obtain the means of introducing 
costly improvements in the management of his business. It had 
become apparent, too, that the long-continued efforts to build up 
the maritime power of England had been crowned with success; 
she had established commercial connections with all parts of the 
globe, and had access to markets that were practically unlimited. 
Under these circumstances, enterprising men were willing to run 
the risk of introducing expensive novelties, and inventors could 
reasonably hope to reap advantage themselves from the improve- 
ments they suggested. 

In the seventeenth century such an expansion had hardly been 
possible at all; the dominant principles were still in favor of a 
well-ordered trade, to be maintained by securing special con- 
cessions; the interlopers, who were prepared to contest such 
privileges and to force their business on any terms they could, were 
still regarded as injurious to the sound and healthy development 
of commerce. But after the revolution, England entered on a new 



V 



508 English Historians 

phase of mercantile life; and the keen competition which had 
been allowed free play temporarily during the Interregnum, with 
disastrous results, came to be accepted as the ordinary atmos- 
phere of trade. The principles, which the interlopers had prac- 
tised, were being more generally adopted, and all merchants 
became agreed that it was by pushing their wares, and selling 
goods that were better and cheaper than those of other countries, 
that new markets could be opened up and old ones retained. The 
" well-ordered trade" of the merchant companies would hardly 
have afforded sufficient scope for the introduction of mechanical 
improvements in manufacturing. In the civic commerce of the 
Middle Ages, and during the seventeenth century, merchants had 
looked to well-defined and restricted markets in which they held 
exclusive rights. So long as this was the case, attempts were made 
to carry on industrial production so as just to meet these limited 
requirements, and to secure conditions for the artisan, by guard- 
ing him from competition and authoritatively assessing his wages. 
As merchants and manufacturers realized that they could best gain 
and keep foreign markets, not by special privileges, but by sup- 
plying the required goods at low rates, they aimed at introducing 
the conditions of manufacture under which industrial expansion 
is possible. This opinion commended itself more and more to 
men of business and legislators, but it penetrated slowly among the 
artisans, who preferred the stability of the life they enjoyed under 
a system of regulation and restriction. Workmen were inclined 
to oppose the introduction of machinery in so far as it tended to 
upset the old-established order of the realm, while others seem to 
have hoped that machinery would confer on England a monopoly 
of industrial power so that she would be able to dictate her own 
terms to foreign purchasers, and to rear up a new exclusive system. 

§ 3. Decline of the Regulative Policy 

The old ideas, which had given rise to the trade institutions of 
the Middle Ages, and which had continued to be dominant in the 
seventeenth century, were not dead at the opening of the nine- 
teenth century, but they no longer appealed either to the capitalist 
classes or to the intelligence of Parliament. No authoritative 
attempt was made to recast the existing regulations so as to suit 
the changing conditions. To do so was not really practicable; 
only two courses lay open to the legislators. They could either 
forbid the introduction of machinery, as Charles I had done, for 



The Industrial Revolution 509 

fear that people would be thrown out of work, or they could smooth 
the way for the introduction of the new methods by removing the 
existing barriers. The House of Commons chose the latter 
alternative, since the members had come to regard all efforts 
to prevent the use of mechanical appliances as alike futile and 
inexpedient. 

In the absence of any enforcement of the old restrictions, in 
regard to the hours and terms of employment, the difficulties of 
the transition were intensified; and the laborers, who had never 
been subjected to such misery under the old regime, agitated for 
the thorough enforcement of the Elizabethan laws. The working 
classes, for the most part, took their stand on the opinions as to 
industrial policy which had been traditional in this country, and 
were embodied in existing legislation. To the demand of the 
capitalist for perfect freedom for industrial progress, the laborers 
were inclined to reply by taking an attitude of impracticable con- 
servatism; it was not till many years had elapsed, and freedom 
for economic enterprise had been secured, that serious attempts 
were made, from an entirely different point of view, to control the 
new industrial system so that its proved evils should be reduced to 
a minimum. The artisans were so much attached to the tradi- 
tional methods of securing the well-being of the laborer that they 
hung aloof for a time from the humanitarian effort to remedy par- 
ticular abuses by new legislation. 

§ 4. Extent and Character of the Industrial Changes 

We have no adequate means of gauging the rapidity and violence 
of the industrial revolution which occurred in England during the 
seventy years from 1770 to 1840; it commenced with the changes 
in the hardware trades, which have been already described, but 
the crisis occurred when inventive progress extended to the textile 
trades. Despite the gradual development, it seems likely enough 
that, while centuries passed, there was little alteration in the gen- 
eral aspect of England; but the whole face of the country was 
changed by the industrial revolution. In 1770 there was no 
Black Country, blighted by the conjunction of coal and iron trades; 
there were no canals, or railways, and no factory towns with their 
masses of population. The differentiation of town and country 
had not been carried nearly so far as it is to-day. All the familiar 
features of our modern life, and all its most pressing problems, 
have come to the front within the last century and a quarter. 



510 English Historians 

The changes included in the term industrial revolution are so 
complicated and so various that it is not easy to state, far less to 
solve, the questions which they raise. There have been many 
different forms of industrial invention. Sometimes there has been 
the introduction of new processes, as in the important series of 
experiments by which the problem of smelting and working iron, 
with fuel obtained from coal, was finally solved; and this, as we 
have seen, was of extraordinary importance. Other improve- 
ments have consisted in the employment of new implements, by 
which the skilled laborer is assisted to do his work more quickly 
or better; one example has been noticed in the flying shuttle, and 
the substitution of the spinning-wheel for the whorl and spindle 
was another. But such a change is hardly to be described as the 
introduction of machinery. A machine, as commonly understood, 
does not assist a man to do his work; it does the work itself, under 
human guidance ; its characteristic feature is that it is an application 
of power, and not of human exertion. Hence the introduction of 
machinery always has a very direct bearing on the position of the 
laborer. From one point of view we may say that it^saves him 
from drudgery; from another, that it forces upon him the strain 
of a competition in which he is overmatched, and thus gradually 
deprives him of employment. The invention of new processes 
and new implements has not such a necessary and direct result 
on the employment and remuneration of labor as occurs with the 
introduction of machines. So far as the wealth of the realm was 
concerned, the development of the coal and iron trades was of 
extraordinary importance, but the substitution of mechanical in- 
ventions for hand labor in the textile trades brought about a 
revolution in social life throughout the country. 

Though the changes effected by the industrial revolution have 
been so startling, it may be yet said, when we view them from an 
economic standpoint, that they were of unexampled violence rather 
than wholly new. After all, the age of mechanical invention was 
only one phase of a larger movement. We have traced the gradual 
intervention of capital in industry and agriculture, especially dur- 
ing the eighteenth century; we shall now have to note the opera- 
tion of the same force, but at a greatly accelerated pace. Capital 
obtained a footing and held its ground in the cloth trade, because 
of the facilities which the wealthy man enjoyed for purchasing 
materials, or for meeting the markets. Other trades, such as coal 
mining or iron manufacture, had been necessarily capitalistic in 
type from the earliest days, because none but wealthy men were 



The Industrial Revolution 511 

able to purchase an expensive plant, and to run risks of setting it 
up. The invention of mechanical appliances for the textile trades 
gave a still greater advantage to the rich employer, as compared 
with the domestic weaver, since only substantial men could afford 
to employ machines. It was a further sign of the triumph of the 
modern system of business management. 

§ 5. Effect of Machinery on Labor 

It is worth while to distinguish some of the principal changes 
in connection with labor which resulted from the increase of 
capitalist organization and especially from machine production. 
The opening chapter of the Wealth of Nations calls attention to 
the important improvement which is known as the division of 
processes. Adam Smith there points out that an employer can 
organize production, and assign each man his own particular task 
in such a way, that there shall be a saving of time and of skill. 
There will also be other advantages, such as increase of deftness, 
from the acquired facility in doing some one operation rapidly and 
well. The division of processes is sure to arise under any capital- 
ist system of control; in some districts of the cloth trade, it had 
been carried out to a very considerable extent for centuries, and it 
is true to say that increased subdivision has facilitated the invention 
of machinery. None the less is it also true that the adoption of 
mechanical appliances has led to the development of new forms 
of specialized labor, and has tended to confine men more exclu- 
sively to particular departments of work. 

The invention of machinery, as well as the introduction of new 
processes, brought about a considerable shifting of labor. The 
employment of coal for smelting iron tended to the disuse of char- 
coal burning, and caused an increased demand for hewers in coal 
mines ; whether there was less employment or more, in connection 
with the production of a ton of suitable fuel, it was employment of 
a different kind. The adoption of machinery in the textile trades 
also caused an extraordinary shifting of labor, for children were 
quite competent to tend machines which carried on work that had 
hitherto occupied adults. On the whole, machinery rendered it 
possible in many departments of industry to substitute unskilled 
for skilled labor. 

The tendency, which had been observable during the early part 
of the century, for manufacturers to migrate to particular districts, 
was enormously accelerated by the introduction of machinery. So 



512 English Historians 

far as the cloth trade was concerned, the trend appears to have 
been due to the facilities which water-power afforded for fulling- 
mills; and as one invention after another was introduced, it 
became not merely advantageous, but necessary for the manu- 
facturer to establish his business at some place where power was 
available. We have in consequence the rapid concentration of 
industries in the West Riding and other areas where water-power 
could be had, and the comparative desertion of low- lying and level 
districts. The application of steam-power caused a further 
readjustment in favor of the coal-producing areas; but this new 
development did not resuscitate the decaying industries of the 
eastern counties, since they were as badly off for coal as they 
were for water-power. 

The introduction of machinery rendered it necessary to con- 
centrate the laborers in factories where the machines were in opera- 
tion ; the new methods of work were incompatible with the continued 
existence of cottage industry. The man who worked in his own 
house, whether as a wage-earner under the capitalist system or as 
an independent tradesman under the domestic system, was no 
longer required, so soon as it was proved that machine production 
was economically better. In the same way, the concentration of 
spinning in factories deprived the women of a by-employment in 
their cottage. During the greater part of the eighteenth century 
industrial occupations were very widely diffused, and the intercon- 
nection between the artisan population and rural occupation was 
close. The severance had already begun ; but under the influence 
of the introduction of machinery it went on with greater rapidity, 
till the differentiation of town from country employment was 
practically complete. 

The divorce of the industrial population from the soil tended on 
the one hand to the impoverishment of the rural districts, from 
which manufactures were withdrawn, and on the other to a notable 
change in the position of the workman; he came to be wholly 
dependent on his earnings, and to have no other source to which 
he could look for support. The cottage weavers, whether wage- 
earners or independent men, had had the opportunity of work in 
the fields in harvest and of supplementing their income from their 
gardens or through their privileges on the common wastes. When 
the industrial population were massed in factory towns they were 
necessarily deprived of these subsidiary sources of income, and 
their terms of employment were affected by the state of trade. So 
long as cottage industry lasted, the workmen had something to 



The Industrial Revolution 



513 



fall back upon when times were bad ; but under the new conditions 
the fluctuations were much more violent than they had ever been 
before, and the workman had no means of improving his position. 
The prosperity of the mass of the population no longer rested on 
the solid basis of land, but upon the fluctuating basis of trade. 

The age of invention then was not merely concerned, as might 
at first sight appear, with the improvement of particular arts; it 
effected an entire revolution in the economic life of the country ; for 
this reason it is not quite easy to weigh against one another the 
loss and gain involved in such a fundamental change. We see on 
the one hand the signs of marvellous economic progress, an im- 
mensely increased command over material resources of all sorts 
and an extraordinary development of trade and wealth, with the 
consequent ability to cope with the schemes by which Napoleon 
endeavored to compass our ruin. On the other hand we see a loss 
of stability of every kind; England as a nation forfeited her self- 
sufficing character and became dependent on an imported food 
supply; and a large proportion of the population, who had been 
fairly secure in the prospect of shelter and employment and sub- 
sistence for their lives, were reduced to a condition of the greatest 
uncertainty as to their lot from year to year or from week to week. 
Over against the rapid advance of material prosperity must be set 
the terrible suffering which was endured, especially in the period 
of transition ; and while we congratulate ourselves on the progress 
that has taken place, we should not forget the cost at which it 
has been obtained, or the elements of well-being that have been 
sacrificed. 

§ 6. Rise of the Capitalist Class 

There were, however, certain sections of the community which 
were able to take advantage of the period of change, and to adapt 
themselves rapidly to the new conditions; a class of capitalist 
manufacturers came into great prominence, and they were soon 
able to exercise considerable influence in Parliament. There had, 
of course, been wealthy employers in certain districts, especially in 
the iron trade, and in the cloth trade of the west of England ; but 
the moneyed men of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had 
been merchants rather than manufacturers of textile goods. It 
was only with the progress of the industrial revolution that the 
wealthy employer of labor attained to anything like the social status 
which had been accorded to successful merchants from time 

2L 



514 English Historians 

immemorial. But the triumph of capital in industry involved 
the rise and prosperity of a large number of captains of industry. 
It seems probable that there was comparatively little room for 
the intrusion of new men in the old centres of the trades. There 
were large and well-established houses engaged in this manufac- 
ture in the west of England, and they had an honorable ambition 
to maintain the traditions of their trades. In Yorkshire, too, there 
was a class of capitalist merchants who were ready to deflect their 
energies into manufacturing as occasion arose. The wealthy em- 
ployers of the West Riding seem to have been chiefly drawn from 
this class, though they were doubtless reenforced to some extent 
by individuals who had risen from the ranks. There is reason to 
believe, however, that in Lancashire, and the other areas where 
the cotton trade was carried on, the course of affairs was some- 
what different. This industry was characterized by an extraor- 
dinary expansion, and it offered abundant opportunities for new 
men of energy and perseverance to force their way to the front. 
"Few of the men who entered the trade rich were successful. 
They trusted too much to others — too little to themselves ; whilst 
on the contrary the men who prospered were raised by their own 
efforts commencing in a humble way, generally from exercising 
some handicraft, as clockmaking, hatting, etc., and pushing their 
advance by a series of unceasing exertions, having a very limited 
capital to begin with, or even none at all, saving their own labor." 
The yeomen farmers as a class failed to seize the opportunities 
open to them; but a "few of these men, shaking off their slothful 
habits, both of body and mind, devoted themselves to remedying 
other conditions with a perseverance certain to be successful. Join- 
ing to this determination a practical acquaintance with the details 
of manufactures, personal superintendence and industry, several 
of the most eminently successful steam-manufacturers have sprung 
from this class of people, and have long since become the most 
opulent of a wealthy community." The Peels and the Strutts 
were examples of families which emerged from the ranks of the 
yeomen and acquired great wealth in the cotton trade. Many of 
the rich manufacturers in such towns as Stockport, Hyde, Ducken- 
field, and Staleybridge had in early life worked as "hatters, shoe- 
makers, carters, weavers, or some other trade." Some of these 
self-made men were not disinclined to be proud of their own suc- 
cess, and to be at once hard and contemptuous toward the man 
who had shown so little energy as to remain in the laboring class, 
as if it was less his fortune than his fault. 



The Industrial Revolution 515 



§ 7. The Manchester School 

It was not unnatural that, as the cotton manufacture continued 
to increase, Manchester should become the centre of a school of 
men who were deeply imbued with the belief that in industrial 
affairs the battle was to the strong and the race to the swift. The 
system, which the mercantilists had built up with the view of 
stimulating industry, seemed to this new race only to stifle and 
hamper it. Under somewhat different circumstances the capitalist 
employers might have been eager to secure protection. The nou- 
veaux riches of the fourteenth century were eager to protect Eng- 
lish municipalities against the intrusion of aliens; the merchant 
princes of the seventeenth century organized a restrictive system 
by means of which they hoped to foster the English industry at 
the expense of the French and the Dutch. American millionnaires 
have found their protective tariff an assistance in building up 
gigantic trusts. It is at least conceivable that the cotton manu- 
facturers of the early part of the nineteenth century should have 
endeavored to retain for a time a monopoly of industrial power, and 
have forced other peoples to pay such prices as would have enabled 
them to remodel the conditions of production in a satisfactory 
fashion. This policy would have commended itself to the minds 
of the artisans ; had it been adopted, the cleavage between capital 
and labor would hardly have been so marked. But the spirit of 
keen competition had caught hold of the employing class; they 
were of opinion, and in all probability their judgment on this point 
was perfectly sound, that it was only by a continued exercise of the 
activity by which they had found their way into foreign markets 
that they could hope to retain them. 

The Manchester School were aiming at the same object as the 
mercantilists had pursued during the period of Whig ascendency : 
they desired to promote the industrial activity of the country ; but 
the means they recommended were the very opposite of those 
which had been adopted in earlier days. They felt that they could 
dispense with fostering care and exclusive privileges ; this was in 
itself a tribute to the success of the policy which had been so steadily 
pursued for generations. The maritime power of England had 
been built up, the industry had been developed, the agriculture 
had been stimulated, and the economic life had become so vigorous 
that it appeared to have outgrown the need of extraneous help. 
There seemed to be a danger that the very measures which had 



5 1 6 English Historians 

been intended to support it should prove to be fetters that ham- 
pered its growth. 

§ 8. The Introduction of Machinery in the Textile Trades 

The cotton manufacture was the first of the textile trades to be 
revolutionized by the introduction of new machinery. Appliances 
worked by power had been in operation from time immemorial in 
the subsidiary operations of the woollen trade, such as the fulling- 
mills, and silk-mills had been erected on the model of those in 
Piedmont; but the series of inventions for carding and spinning 
cotton, which is associated with the name of Richard Arkwright, 
marks the beginning of a fresh era. He had been brought up as a 
barber, and does not appear to have had either the technical ac- 
quaintance with the cotton trade or the mechanical skill which 
might be expected in a great inventor. Still he possessed such 
business ability as to inspire the confidence of wealthy patrons, 
who supplied him with the necessary funds. " By adopting various 
inventors' ideas he completed a series of machines for carding and 
roving. He was enabled to do this the more easily by having the 
command of a large capital. The inventors of the improvements 
had not the means of carrying them into effect on an extensive 
scale ; they found the game, but from want of capital were unable 
to secure it, whilst Mr. Arkwright by availing himself of their in- 
ventions and by inducing ' men of property to engage with him 
to a large amount' reaped all the advantages and obtained all the 
rewards;" and he succeeded in rendering the ideas of other men 
a practical success. Roller-spinning had been patented by Lewis 
Paul in 1738, but his rights had expired. The same principle was 
applied by Thomas Highs in the water frame, which was the 
basis on which Arkwright worked. He set up a spinning-mill with 
horse-power at Nottingham in 1 771, and afterwards made use of 
water-power in his mill at Cromford, in Derbyshire. In 1775 he 
obtained a patent, which embraced the inventions of Lewis Paul 
and others. Arkwright's exclusive claims were ignored by other 
manufacturers, and he had recourse to the courts to enforce them; 
but finally, in the action which he brought against Colonel Mor- 
daunt, Arkwright failed to maintain his alleged rights; and his 
appeal to the public, entitled The Case oj Mr. Richard Arkwright, 
did not create the favorable impression he had expected. There 
was henceforth no hindrance to the general use of power-spinning. 
The hand-jenny, which was improved from Highs' invention by 



The Industrial Revolution 517 

Hargreave of Blackburn about 1767, had met with serious oppo- 
sition, and it had hardly been introduced in the cotton districts 
before it was superseded, and the work transferred to mills where 
water-power was available. A further invention in 1775 by Cromp- 
ton, of the water mule which combined the principles of the jenny 
and the water frame, rendered it possible to obtain a much finer 
thread than had previously been produced by machinery, so that 
it became possible to develop the muslin manufacture. Through 
these changes the carding, roving, and spinning of cotton were no 
longer continued as cottage employments, and weaving was the only 
part of the manufacture which was not concentrated in factories. 
The cotton trade had a peculiar position among English manu- 
factures ; it was not an industry for which the country was naturally 
adapted, for the materials were imported, and it had never enjoyed 
the protection bestowed on some other exotic trades, for there was 
no serious French competition. The early history of the trade is 
very obscure; and it is rendered particularly confusing by the 
ambiguous use of the term cottons, which was applied in the six- 
teenth century to some kinds of cloth manufactured from wool. 
There can be little doubt, however, that the trade in Manchester 
goods, in which Humphrey Chetham made his fortune, included 
cottons and fustians made from the vegetable material. In 1641 
we have an undoubted mention of the weaving of cotton in its 
modern sense ; Lewis Roberts speaks with admiration of the enter- 
prise of the Manchester men who bought the cotton wool of Cyprus 
and Smyrna in London and sold quantities of fustians, vermilions, 
and dimities. A few years earlier, in 1626, we have an isolated 
proposal to employ the poor in the spinning and weaving of cotton 
wool; it seems likely enough that the industry was planted in 
Lancashire about 1685 by immigrants from Antwerp, a city where 
the fustian manufacture had been prosecuted with success. But 
however it was planted, it took root in Lancashire and developed 
steadily till about 1740, when an era of more rapid progress began. 
The competition of the East India Company was that which the 
manufacturers had most reason to fear, and though the cloth they 
wove of cotton on a linen warp had a practical monopoly in the 
home market, they were liable to be undersold by the company in 
foreign markets. Arkwright's inventions, by spinning a firmer 
cotton thread than had hitherto been procurable and one which 
was suitable for the warp, made it possible to manufacture a cloth 
on terms which rendered it acceptable in markets in all parts of 
the world. 



5 1 B English Historians 

The effect of Arkwright's success was to open up to a trade that 
had hitherto been conducted on a small scale the possibility of 
enormous and indefinite expansion. Materials could be obtained 
in considerable quantities from the East and the Bahamas; and 
in the last decades of the eighteenth century increasing supplies 
were procured from the Southern States. Since plenty of raw 
material was available, the manufacture advanced rapidly to meet the 
enlarging demand for cheap cotton cloth. It is to be noticed, how- 
ever, that the trade was liable to serious interruptions; both for 
the materials used, and for access to the markets in which the cloth 
was sold, the Lancashire manufacturers were dependent on foreign 
commerce ; and a breach of mercantile intercourse might dis- 
organize the whole of the industry. This occurred to some extent 
from the decline of the American demand for Manchester goods 
during the War of Independence ; as a result there was considerable 
distress among the hands employed. They were inclined to attrib- 
ute it to the introduction of machinery and there was a good deal 
of rioting and destruction of spinning-jennies in parts of Lancashire. 
Apart from these periods of distress, however, the trade increased 
by leaps and bounds, and it was alleged in 1806 that a third part 
in value of all our exports was sent abroad in the form of cotton 
goods. 

This unexampled expansion of the industry opened up a very 
much larger field for employment than had been available before 
the era of these inventions. The abundance of yarn, especially 
after 1788, when mule yarns became available, was such that the 
services of weavers were in great demand, and considerable quan- 
tities of yarn were sent abroad for use on foreign looms. The 
kinds of labor needed were not very different from those required 
in the old days of hand spinning and carding; but girls and women 
were concentrated in factories to tend the machines, instead of 
spinning with their wheels in cottages. This case affords an ex- 
cellent illustration of an important principle in regard to labor- 
saving machinery; when the improvement renders the article 
cheaper and thereby stimulates the demand, it is quite likely that 
there will be an increased call for labor, because the machine has 
come into use. The artisans, who thought that such inventions 
must necessarily deprive them of their occupation, were mistaken ; 
the number of hands engaged in the cotton trade to-day is un- 
doubtedly much larger than it was in the time of Arkwright. Much 
remains to be said about the conditions and terms of employment; 
but there can be no doubt whatever that the introduction of 






The Industrial Revolution 519 

machinery did not diminish the numbers occupied in the cotton 
trade. 

The only check to the indefinite expansion of the trade lay in 
the limited supply of water-power available ; that cause for appre- 
hension was removed, however, by the invention of Boulton and 
Watt, and the application of steam as the motive power in cotton- 
mills. Though steam engines had long been in use for pumping 
water from mines, the improvements, which reduced the cost of 
working and rendered it possible to apply steam power to industry, 
were an immense advance. 

At Papplewick, in Nottinghamshire, a steam cotton-mill was 
erected in 1785; and the new power was utilized for spinning at 
Manchester in 1789, and at Glasgow in 1792. Its full effect was 
only gradually felt, and water continued to be economically the 
better agent during the first quarter of the nineteenth century; but 
eventually as a consequence of Watt's invention, water-falls be- 
came of less value. Instead of carrying the people to the power, 
employers found it preferable to place the power among the people 
at the most convenient trading centres. The factory system is 
older than the application of steam to the textile trades; but the 
introduction of the new mechanical power tended to destroy the 
advantage of factory villages on streams, and rendered possible 
the gradual concentration of the population in factory towns. 

The cotton trade, as depending on imported materials and sup- 
plying foreign markets, was probably a capitalistic trade from the 
very first ; the suggestion that it was planted by immigration from 
abroad harmonizes with this view, and though the weavers were 
cottagers, it is likely that they were wage-earners and not men who 
worked on the domestic system. However this may be, the manu- 
facture was organized on capitalistic lines from the time of the 
introduction of machinery, and the cotton factories which rose 
in the neighborhood of Manchester and other large towns soon 
began to attract public attention. 1 

1 For full bibliography, consult Cunningham, op. cit., pp. 943 ff. 



CHAPTER V 

THE CONTINENTAL SYSTEM 

Patriotism, political partisanship, and religious opinions have 
greatly obscured the real issues at stake in the long wars which 
England waged with France from 1793 to 181 5. To get at the 
forces which brought on and continued this contest, it is not 
enough to study the diplomatic negotiations immediately preced- 
ing the outbreak of the war; one must turn to the history of the 
two centuries of conflict, armed and peaceful, prior to the Revolu- 
tion ; one must examine the distribution of colonial and commercial 
interests in the various parts of the world; and finally, one must 
study the internal economic conditions of France and England. 
Unfortunately we have in English no book on these particular 
aspects, but Professor Sloane in the following article has given a 
balanced though short account of the main forces at work. 

§ 1. Commercial Position 0} England at the Outbreak of the 

French War l 

The phrase "a nation of shopkeepers" was used to stigmatize 
\S the English by Samuel Adams in the Independent Advertiser as 
early as 1748. It expressed the feelings of the English in America 
toward the English in England with perfect accuracy, and was 
destined to become a winged word throughout Europe. The 
Seven Years' War was a struggle for commercial supremacy 
which made England in a new sense the arbiter of the world's 
commerce. The American Revolution began ostensibly, at least, 
in certain questions of trade, taxation, and representation, and 
the fundamental question of racial and institutional development, 
which bore much the same relation to the struggle as that of 

1 Reprinted from the Political Science Quarterly, Vol. XIII, pp. 213 ff. 
By permission of Professor Sloane and Ginn & Company, Publishers. 

520 



The Continental System 521 

slavery bore to our Civil War, did not appear until at its close. 
Again, the French Revolution was apparently concerned at first 
with matters of internal finance and taxation ; but before the close 
it was plain to every observer that the relation of the new republic 
to the balance of political and economic power throughout Europe 
was the question on which hung its stability. 

Politically, England had suffered a reverse in our Revolution, but 
she had managed to retain her control of American commerce. 
In the year 1783 she was distinctly stronger than any other land, 
not even excepting France. On the outbreak of the Continental ./ 
Revolution she had everything to win or lose in the decision as to 
what influence should preponderate on the globe at the close of 
the epoch which she had inaugurated in her own Revolution of 
1688. The armed peace which lasted until 1793 was therefore a 
pregnant time in the field of political and economic speculation — 
a period in which the wealth of England was the cynosure of all 
eyes and the universal topic of discussion. Yet the conclusion 
reached in France was that expressed by Kersaint in his speech 
before the Convention on January 13, 1793, "The credit of Eng- 
land rests on a fictitious wealth." 

This and a similar statement by Brissot represented the view 
of the extreme Radical party. At the beginning of the discussion 
there had been many opinions. Pitt's commercial treaty with 
France of 1786 was highly favorable to the wine growers of the 
south and to such manufacturers of the west and centre as did not 
directly compete with those of England ; accordingly it was popular 
in those regions. But in the north, where the industrial and com- 
mercial interests were in direct competition with those of Great 
Britain, the treaty was regarded with detestation, as preliminary to 
the further development of a deep-laid plot to annihilate French 
trade. With the march of political events this feeling spread, 
and France, from being a land guided by free-traders, went to the 
opposite extreme and became strongly protectionist. Reviving 
the commercial policy of the old regime, the republic outran 
the zeal of the monarchy. Such, according to our best authority, 
Mollien, was the condition of public opinion when Bonaparte 
took charge in 1800. 

§ 2. French Protective Policy and Bonaparte 

It is needless to say that a man like the First Consul, who was a 
suitor for public favor, made the universal jealousy of England's 



522 English Historians 

commercial supremacy in a special and peculiar sense his fore- 
most care. But that Bonaparte did not originate the high pro- 
tection policy of France is proved by the remarkable enactment 
known as the Loi de 10 Brumaire, An V (October 31, 1796). 
This drastic measure forbade the importation of all manufactured 
articles, either made in England or passing through the channels 
of English trade by land or sea, except under certain stringent and 
exceptional regulations as to trans-shipment, and ordered the con- 
fiscation of such articles if found in a French port on any vessel 
whatsoever. The carefully prepared list of the articles of English 
manufacture thus to be shut out included everything in the pro- 
duction of which the expansion of English manufactures at the 
close of the last century made Great Britain super-eminent, — 
products of the loom, the forge, the tannery, the glass house, the 
sugar refinery, and the potter's kiln. Fourteen concluding articles 
of the law enacted a system of trade control whereby, to all ap- 
pearance, the evasion of either the letter or spirit of the law was 
made impossible. 

Yet for a time the disintegration of the public powers under 
the Directory was such that in spite of "the exasperation of the 
national hatred against the English government," the law was 
simply ignored. On December 4, 1798, however, there was a 
sudden change ; without warning, strong military detachments 
were placed at the gates of Paris and every vehicle was searched 
carefully, domiciliary visits were commenced by the customs au- 
thorities and were continued until all English wares were removed 
from commerce, and French public opinion supported these pro- 
ceedings, which the English stigmatized as "legal robbery." The 
fact was that Napoleon Bonaparte had temporarily taken up the 
task of administration, and, having correctly read the public 
temper, was beginning the policy of "thorough." The treaty of 
Campio Formio had been concluded; and though he was only 
commander-in-chief of the French army — and that by construc- 
tion rather than in form — he was really the arbiter of the gov- 
ernment. Whatever the masses thought, the Directory knew that 
the fate of France was in his hands; and nothing confirmed that 
opinion more strongly than the ease with which the law enacted 
two years before was now enforced. Having made what he con- 
sidered easy terms with Austria, he had determined to destroy the 
credit of Pitt's government by attacking English industries and 
commerce, and, to defy, if necessary, the neutral carriers of the 
world. It appears to have been at this time that his mind formed 



The Continental System 523 

the "Chimaera," as a French historian calls it, which in the end 
proved his ruin — the conception that, if only the conservative 
administration of Great Britain could be discredited, the Whigs 
would adhere to "the republican peace." 

The time was not ripe for any attack on England more direct 
than this; and to occupy the interval until it might become so, 
the well-worn scheme of harassing her at her extremities was 
revived. The uneasy Bonaparte was temporarily removed from 
the scene of the administration by the Egyptian expedition, in- 
tended at least to menace English commerce in those distant parts 
of the earth if not to work the complete ruin of her Oriental em- 
pire. But if the time was not ripe to engage in active hostilities 
for the enforcement of an economic doctrine, this fact was not due 
to any absence of such doctrine, formulated and avowed. 

§ 3. The Theory of Protection and Exclusion 

The theory of a closed jural state, which had been evolved in 
defence of the final stage in the formation of European nationality, S, 
was itself undergoing an expansion in the direction of expounding 
the international relations of States in commercial affairs. In 1801 
Fichte published his famous treatise entitled The Closed Com- 
mercial State, his contribution to the literature of Utopias. De- 
fining the jural State as a limited body of men subject to the same 
laws and to the same coactive sovereignty, he declared that the 
same body of men ought to be stringently limited to like reciprocity 
of commerce and industry, and that any one not under the same 
legislative power and the same coactive force should be excluded n 
from participation in this relation ; thus would be formed a closed 
commercial State parallel to the closed jural State. His treatise 
was divided into three books entitled, respectively, Philosophy, 
Contemporary History, and Politics, preceded by an introduction 
discussing the relation of the rational State to the real, and of pure 
public law to politics. The first book was merely an elaboration 
of his idea as to what is just and right within the rational State, 
in view of trade relations as they are; in the second book he pro- 
ceeded to discuss the actual condition of commercial intercourse 
in the existing States ; and in the third book he considered how the 
theory of a closed commercial State was to be realized. The vital 
portion of his argument lay in the statement that if all Christian 
Europe, with its colonies and factories in other quarters of the 
globe, was to be considered as a whole, trade must remain free as it 



5 2 4 



English Historians 



once was; if, however, it was to be divided into several wholes, 
each under its own government, it must likewise be divided into 
several entirely closed commercial States. Said he : — 

" Those systems which demand free trade, those claims to the 
right to buy and sell freely in the whole known world, have been 
handed down to us from among the ideas of our ancestors, for 
whom they were suited ; we took them without examination and 
adopted them, and it is with trouble that we substitute others for 
them." 

Seven years later the same philosopher declared, in his better- 
known Address to the German Nation, that the much-vaunted 
liberty of the seas was a matter entirely indifferent to the Ger- 
mans. For the preservation of their peculiar genius, he argued, 
they should be saved from all participation, direct or indirect, 
in the wealth of other people; otherwise the curse of commer- 
cialism would overtake them. 

Thus the "idealogues" of Europe, German and French, held 
identical opinions. They appear to have had multitudes of sup- 
porters in all lands. At any rate, it is idle to charge Bonaparte 
with being the inventor of the rigid protectionist doctrines that he 
endeavored to apply to the dominions which, when acquired by 
conquest, he intended to incorporate in a European empire hav- 
ing its capital and administrative seat at Paris. They were held 
by the men of the Terror in 1793, by the Directory in 1796, by the 
overwhelming majority of the French people in 1798, and by a 
respectable number of Germans and of Americans in the years 
immediately succeeding; while they are still held by immense num- 
bers of those in whom the idea of nationality preponderates over 
all other political concepts. 

§ 4. Economic Situation at the Truce of Amiens 

The Berlin Decree, which is generally considered to have in- 
augurated the Continental System in form, is, in fact, antedated 
by the Orders in Council of Great Britain. During 1801 English 
commerce was considerably greater than it was during 1802, the 
year of nominal peace; and this was due, of course, to the fact 
that the commercial warfare was not even nominally discontinued. 
The real trouble felt by Lord Whitworth, the British ambassador 
at Paris, was that the existing commercial situation of his country 
was intolerable, and that he must find some casus belli in order to 
end it. It is well known that he fixed on a very trivial pretext, — 



The Continental System 525 

the conduct of Bonaparte at a public reception in the Tuileries, 
and that Great Britain had much difficulty in making the flimsy 
"excuse appear important. The fact was that the First Consul was 
using the peace to extend the protective system of France over all 
the lands which he had conquered in Northern and Central Italy 
and to force Holland and Switzerland into his customs union. In 
consequence English commerce was suffering, and the mission of 
Sebastiani into the Orient made it seem highly probable to Eng- 
lish merchants that the process of further diminishing their trade 
was already under way in those distant parts. The publication 
of Sebastiani's report was the last straw in the burden of the 
British merchants, and they refused to carry the load any longer. 
Bonaparte said that the independence of a nation carried with it 
the absolute control of its trade, and that if Great Britain intended 
to keep both Gibraltar and Malta, she virtually announced by 
that iact her determination to unite the commerce of the Indies, 
the Mediterranean, and the Baltic in a single system controlled by 
herself, which would create a situation intolerable and impossible. 
The peace of Amiens was merely a truce, and the only question 
as to its duration was one of reciprocal forbearance and endurance. 
As soon as it became clear that neither England nor France would 
abandon the idea of commercial supremacy, the vital matter of 
policy on both sides was how to re-open the war. To do this was 
to assume a fearful burden of responsibility. History is still striv- 
ing to determine who gave the immediate impulse; for whoever 
did give it is held responsible for the appalling bloodshed of the 
Napoleonic as distinguished from the Republican wars. To-day 
even the English historians of the most enlightened sort admit 
that France was tricked into the declaration of war. The coalition 
was in process of formation within a few days after the ink was dry 
on the treaty of Campo Formio ; it was in readiness when hostili- 
ties broke out; and' the fuel necessary to make the intermittent 
flickering flames burst forth anew was supplied by the successive 
Orders in Council. 

§ 5. An English Argument for the Destruction oj France 

In 1805 there was printed in London and published anony- 
mously a book which is now believed to have been officially in- 
spired. It was actually written by James Stephen, and the title 
was War in Disguise, or the Frauds of the Neutral Flag. Its 
argument was the need of the destruction of France to prevent 



526 English Historians 

the ruin of England. The immediate dilemma considered was the 
sacrifice of Great Britain's maritime rights or a quarrel with the 
neutral powers. The author thought that the system of licenses 

— "salt water indulgences," he called them — was shaking Eng- 
land's supremacy exactly as the papal indulgences of the fifteenth 
century had shaken the Roman supremacy. In attacking neutral 
trade, he thought there was little danger of provoking hostilities 
or evoking reprisals. As to America, particularly, a non-importa- 
tion policy on her part would injure herself alone. She was far 
too honorable to confiscate the property of English merchants 
within her borders, and far too shrewd to expose to retributive 
seizure the enormous commerce which she herself had afloat. 
Suppose, however, he continued, that neither the sacrifice of mari- 
time rights nor the quarrel with neutral powers be accepted, there 
remains still a third possibility, — to admit the pretension that 
"free ships make free goods," to suspend the navigation laws, and 
then to seize all the benefits of neutral carriers. "Let brooms be 
put at the mastheads of all our merchantmen, and their seamen 
be sent to the fleets." This, he argued, would be a less evil than 
that under which English commerce was suffering, unless, indeed, 
all parties, including the enemy, would abjure the right of capturing 
merchant ships of private effects of an enemy — a visionary 
means of reconciling naval war with commercial peace. Such 
general abjuration was impossible, and there remained no remedy 
for England's ills save peace with Bonaparte. But the mere sug- 
gestion of this action was preposterous. The insuperable bar- 
rier was the British constitution. Austria and Russia might 
make peace with a military despot ; but with a man who employed 
the leisure of peace for no other purpose than to enslave the smaller 
powers of the Continent no peace was possible for a free country 
like England, except such a one as would be equivalent to abso- 
lute surrender. As might have been expected, the Englishman 
who wrote War in Disguise concluded his argument with a pious 
appeal to the Almighty, obedience to whose righteous laws is the 
soundest political wisdom, and who wills not only the end, but 
the means — in this case "volunteers, navy, and maritime rights." 
This temper for war to the bitter end was quite as strong in France 
as in England; and while the English appealed to God and 
righteousness, it was equally characteristic that the French were 
at the same time exploiting a parallel drawn from classical history 

— that of Rome and Carthage. 



The Continental System 527 



§ 6. Napoleon and Commercial Imperialism 

The Grand Army of England, assembled by Bonaparte at 
Boulogne, was a two-edged weapon. Napoleon told Metternich 
that he always intended to use it against Austria, as he actually 
did use it; but he told the captain of the Northumberland, on 
August 15, 181 5, that he had intended the invasion seriously, ex- 
pecting to land as near London as possible. Although these 
antipodal statements were clearly intended to flatter the national 
pride of the respective dignitaries to whom they were addressed, 
yet, paradoxical as the assertion seems, when taken together they 
express the exact truth: successful invasion would have involved 
the immediate overthrow of British power; while protective ex- 
clusion and the destruction of the coalition was the slower, per- 
haps, but the more certain of the two ways. The latter was 
probably the intention toward which Napoleon leaned most seri- 
ously. By compelling the British to maintain a costly war es- 
tablishment, the great schemer would exhaust their by no means 
bottomless purse and thus would be able to cripple the equip- 
ment of the coalition, to expand by victory the territorial empire 
of France, and to open the way for her enterprise to the eastward. 
Finally, Napoleon made no serious effort toward the "Descent," 
using the notion to extort war funds from the French exactly as the 
Jacobins and the Directory had done; and the actual fact of the 
magnificent countermarch toward Vienna and the results of Auster- 
litz ought to convince us that, while at times he did contemplate 
invading England, his mind was on the whole directed toward the 
course he actually pursued, — that of striking at the coalition through 
Austria. 

The extension of the protective system beyond France and the 
countries immediately under her control began in 1803, when 
Spain was admonished to observe it or take the consequences; 
immediately after Austerlitz, Istria, and Dalmatia were included 
in the system. When, thereupon, Prussia was requested to in- 
clude the North Sea coasts in its operation, as the price for the 
occupation of Hanover, Great Britain retorted by her Orders in 
Council, declaring the shore line from the mouth of the Elbe all 
the way around as far as Brest to be in a state of blockade. Prussia 
chose to accept neither the terms of Great Britain nor those of 
France, and struggled to remain neutral — a sheer impossibility; 
the Czar of Russia then repudiated the treaty into which his 



\J 



528 English Historians 

ambassador, D'Oubril, had been drawn by the wiles of Talleyrand; 
in due course of time followed Jena and Friedland, and at last the 
way was clear for turning a protective system hitherto more or less 
local into one which could be more or less Continental. The 
Berlin Decree was the longest step possible after Jena; while the 
Milan Decree was the natural sequence or the enlarged oppor- 
tunity which the Peace of Tilsit gave for pursuing the same old 
economic policy. 

§ 7. The Berlin Decree and Montgaillard's Scheme 

In justification of his course, Napoleon pleaded the moderation 
he had shown in dealing with the enemy after the three first coali- 
tions, and declared in his message to the Senate that he desired 
such a general European peace as would guarantee the prosperity, 
not of England alone, but of all the Continental powers; but as 
the attitude of the enemy rendered this impossible, nothing re- 
mained but to adopt measures " which were repugnant to his 
heart." The Berlin Decree set forth in its preamble that Eng- 
land paid no respect to international law; that she considered as 
enemies, not alone the organized war power of hostile states, but 
the persons and vessels of their citizens engaged in commerce, tak- 
ing the persons prisoners of war and the ships as prizes ; that she 
extended the principle of blockade to unfortified towns, harbors, 
and river mouths, declaring places to be blockaded before which 
there were no forces sufficient to enforce the blockade, and ex- 
tending this absurdity to the coast lines of entire empires; that, 
finally, since this conduct had no other intention than the ruin of 
all Europe to the advantage of English trade, "We have resolved 
to apply to England the usages which she has sanctioned in her 
maritime legislation." The principles of the decree were asserted 
to be valid just as long as England should not admit the validity 
in maritime war of the principles which control war by land ; the 
laws of war cannot be applied, either to private property, whatever 
it may be, or to the persons of those who are not belligerents, and 
the right of blockade must be confined in its application to strong 
places really invested by sufficient forces. The British Isles were 
then declared in a state of blockade, and all the rigors of the Eng- 
lish system were ordered to be carried out in detail. Finally, 
notification in due form was given to the kings of Spain, Naples, 
Holland, and Etruria, and to all Napoleon's allies whose citizens 
were suffering from the " barbarities of English maritime legis- 
lation." 



The Continental System 529 

The date of the Berlin Decree was November 21, 1806. On 
July 25, 1805, Montgaillard, a clever scoundrel, — of whom, as 
Napoleon remarked, something could have been made if he had 
not been fit for hanging, — wrote a memorial which was pre- 
sented to Napoleon and is claimed to have been the basis of the 
Continental System. As expanded on March 24, 1806, this paper 
represents that England has in view the sole object of destroying 
the French marine in order to destroy French commerce, and that, 
consequently, the imperial idea of Europe is one to which she can 
never accede even by a temporary peace ; that she will never re- 
nounce her claim to Hanover or permit the occupation of- Holland, 
her ultimate intention being to establish in Egypt a station to pro- 
tect her commerce by the Red Sea with India. Portugal, which 
will always side with England, must, therefore, be incorporated 
with Spain; while Crete and Egypt must be occupied by both 
military and commercial posts. The influence of England's deep, 
fierce hostility, it continues, is seen in the refusal of both Austria 
and Russia to recognize the newly created vassal kingdom of 
Italy. England arrogated the tyranny of the seas in 1651 by the 
Navigation Act passed under the Protector ; her very existence is 
founded in traffic and commerce, and without it there is no move- 
ment in her body politic. She is forced to disregard all provi- 
sions of international law which tend to diminish her commercial 
strength. William of Orange created her national debt ; and suc- 
cessive sovereigns have in their various Continental and American 
wars increased it to its present dimensions — estimated at about 
six hundred millions sterling. To carry this enormous obliga- 
tion and emit the new loans necessary to sustain the respective 
coalitions, it is essential that her commerce should continuously 
expand. 

"It is through her commerce that England must be attacked 
[says Montgaillard] ; to leave her all her gains in Europe, Asia, and 
America is to leave her all her arms, to render conflicts and wars 
eternal. To destroy British commerce is to strike England to the 
heart." 

He then advances the idea which appears to be the germ of the 
Continental System: Since Russia seems to favor the plans of 
England, and since Sweden is destitute of both independence and 
dignity, France must begin the attack on the maritime legislation 
of the enemy. She has only to make the navigation acts her own, 
modify them in favor of the powers which accept them, and adopt 
a policy of reciprocity. 

2M 



530 English Historians 



§ 8. The Flaw in Napoleon's Reasoning 

How far these councils influenced Napoleon it is impossible to 
say; but the chronological coincidence has some value in sup- 
port of the claim that Montgaillard at least gave the final impulse 
to the Emperor. There seems, however, to have been a fatal flaw 
in the reasoning of both. As the latest Italian commentator has 
remarked, there was no symptom in either executive or counsellor 
of any grasp upon the fact that by the amazing development of 
industry in England the wealth of the entire world had been 
enormously increased — so enormously that without a correspond- 
ing increase in other nations no international rivalry in prosperity 
and influence was at all possible. It was then, as indeed it is 
still, generally supposed that England had reached her eminence 
in commerce by a series of flagrant wrongs ; and when the succes- 
V sive steps of aggression and reprisal are chronologically arranged, 
there is a superficial appearance of truth in the charge. The 
Orders in Council were iniquitous anachronisms, and they gave 
a color of justification to the equally barbarous decrees of France 
— decrees in themselves preposterous, and supported, moreover, 
by a blockade which was as purely fictitious as that by which Great 
Britain supported her Orders in Council. The original sketch 
of the Berlin Decree has been recently discovered in the 
archives at Paris, and it is very important to note that it does not 
contemplate that portion of the completed document which covers 
the lands either allied to or under the influence of France; this 
provision seems to have been added after long reflection. The 
natural complement of a fictitious blockade was a fictitious pro- 
tective system; the one was as absurd as the other. 

§ 9. Extension of Retaliation and Exclusion 

In her puzzled uncertainty, and under the stress of necessity 
for immediate action of some kind, England took the next false 
step in the same direction and issued the Orders of January 7, 
1807, declaring all the ports, not only of France, but of her colonies, 
in a state of blockade and throwing down the gauntlet to the 
neutral States by forbidding any ship to trade between the ports of 
France, of her colonies, and of the countries in the French system ; 
while on November 1 1 a new decree extended the inhibition to all 
ports whatsoever from which the English flag was excluded. This 



The Continental System 531 

extreme position was pronounced by Lord Erskine to be uncon- 
stitutional and contrary to the law of nations. That it was not 
intended to be enforced, but was to be used as a pretext to secure 
maritime monopoly is proved by the fact that already, in the 
month before, Great Britain had inaugurated the policy of evad- 
ing her own decrees, raising the blockade of both the Elbe and the 
Weser, and winking at the contraband trade which immediately 
sprang up in consequence. Napoleon was therefore untiring in 
the system of reprisals ; on November 23 of the same year he issued 
the Milan Decree as a retort both to the scheme of contraband 
trade put into operation at Bremen and Hamburg and to the 
Orders of November 1 1 ; and to supplement this, a second and 
more rigorous decree was promulgated on December 26, 1807. 
Any vessel which had suffered the visitation of English cruisers 
or had put in at an English port was declared thereby to have 
become English and consequently subject to confiscation; an 
embargo was also placed on all neutral ships at that time in French 
harbors. Prussia, Sweden, and Denmark adhered promptly to 
the new Continental System. England was terrified at the con- 
sequences of its own temerity, and on April 26, 1809, modified her 
orders by limiting the blockade to "all the ports of the so-called 
kingdom of Holland, of France and her colonies, and of Southern 
Italy from Orbetello to Pesaro inclusive." Yet, for all this, 
Austria and Switzerland gave in their adhesion somewhat later; 
while America stuck to the principle of non-intercourse and finally 
obtained the revocation in her favor of both the Berlin and the 
Milan Decrees and, in the end, of the Orders in Council. As is 
well known, public necessity proved to be stronger than theory; 
Napoleon's very energy in depriving Continental Europe of colonial 
and English-made articles which, once regarded as luxuries, had 
in time become necessities, together with the consequent exas- 
peration of Great Britain at the diminution of her trade, was one 
of the bonds which combined the most discordant political ele- 
ments into a union for the destruction of French empire. 

§ 10. The Legal Argument in Justification of English Policy 

The English side of the secular controversy which has raged 
over the right and wrong of the Continental System has been pre- 
sented by various writers with great ingenuity and acumen. The 
seizure of private persons and property on the high seas, runs their 
argument, was simply the retort to the French decree of 1798 



$31 English Historians 

which ordered the execution of all neutral sailors found on Eng- 
lish ships; the French had been the first to disregard the law of 
nations in seizing the property of English merchants on terra 
firma at Leghorn, and from times immemorial the usage of Europe 
had authorized the seizure of private property on the high seas; 
the paper blockade, though illegal and absurd, was resorted to 
under great provocation, because Prussia had occupied Hanover, 
a territory which belonged, if not to England, at least to the holder 
of the English crown. It follows, therefore, that every measure 
taken by England was strictly in the nature of a reprisal. This 
legal plea is a question to be considered by jurisprudence, partly 
in the light of the changing identity of France and partly in that of 
variations of obligation due to the incidents of warfare — such, for 
example, as the conduct of England at Copenhagen, which was 
only the culmination of a series of similar acts in the treatment 
of neutrals. It seems very doubtful whether any legal argument 
can avail much in explaining the inconsistencies incident to such 
struggles as the wars which were waged during the Napoleonic 
epoch. 

§ ii. Economic Justification of English Policy 

The real and paramount plea of England is self-defence; the 
arguments based on the political and economic emergencies in 
which she was involved, in consequence of her amazing constitu- 
tional and industrial preeminence, have a validity far beyond any 
which inheres in pleas that are purely technical, and confined at 
that to the field of international law. 

Certain facts recently noted by Rose, the well-known Cam- 
bridge historian, throw a flood of light on the miraculous develop- 
ment of English and Scotch industry during the Napoleonic epoch. 
Robert Owen stated, and in all sobriety, that in 1816 his two thou- 
sand operatives at New Lanark accomplished with the aid of the 
new machinery as much as had been accomplished by all the oper- 
atives in Scotland without it ! In his autobiography, Owen further 
emphasizes the extent of the industrial revolution by estimating 
— and the estimate is conservative — that the work done by the 
manufacturing population of Great Britain with machinery could 
not be done without it by a people numbering less than two hundred 
million. There was no corresponding development of manufac- 
tures on the Continent — not even in France ; thus it was not until 
181 2 that steam spinning was introduced into Mulhouse, the great 



The Continental System $33 

industrial capital of Alsace. Similar comparisons could be drawn 
in many other respects between Great Britain and her Continental 
neighbors ; but this single contrast is enough to render very strik- 
ing the fact that no other power could vie with her in supplying 
the world with cheap and useful wares of such a sort as to become 
after a first trial indispensable to the masses of mankind. She 
found herself, therefore, in the position of being required for the 
sake of peace to discard all her commercial advantages ; all that 
she had gained in her industrial evolution; all the preeminence, 
in short, which she held by exertions and sacrifices that had been 
continuous for centuries. 

Does such a situation create no moral obligation? Is it sup- 
posable that a nation could consider for an instant the possibility 
of destroying itself and its inheritance, for the sake of peace which 
would surrender all its advantages to an active and irreconcilable 
enemy? If there were no alternative except war or suicide, is 
Great Britain to be blamed for choosing war, however desperate ? 
Moreover there is another consideration of the first impor- 
tance which has a moral quality universally recognized in other 
spheres. By common consent no occupation of discovered land 
holds good if it be not permanent and beneficent; and likewise 
the closed economic state cannot be permanent unless it prove to 
be universally beneficent. Such a state now appears to be as 
uncertain in its operations as the closed jural State has proved to 
be under the operation of international agreements which assist 
one nation to enforce its municipal law by the sanction of another. 
Extradition treaties and other equally pregnant innovations in 
international law are now generally admitted to have a jural 
validity, in many of the most important relations of men, that is 
both higher and stronger than that of the municipal law of the 
various States which compose the present federation of civilized 
powers. 

In the same way — tacitly, perhaps, but none the less really — 
it is coming to be widely conceded that the markets of the world 
cannot be closed to wares so good and so cheap as to be necessary 
for the ever-rising standard of comfortable living demanded by 
wage-earners in every land, except on condition that such wares 
can be produced sooner or later as well and as cheaply in the land 
which protects itself against others of its own class. This feel- 
ing is the cause of that deep-rooted enmity of the masses to the 
customs gatherer and his kind — a feeling which makes them the 
most adroit and unscrupulous smugglers. The dislike they have 



jj4 English Historians 

of the travelling and smuggling of the rich is largely created by the 
knowledge, or at least the certitude they feel, that thereby the rich 
secure as buyers in the world's markets advantages which are not 
open to themselves. It is needless to explain that no inkling of 
such a temper, however common in earlier generations, is dis- 
coverable in the England of Napoleonic times ; but the selfishness 
expressed in the Orders in Council was the cover for a growing 
instinct that later became an avowed principle, which is apparently 
destined to be erected into a moral and jural right, of validity 
among all civilized peoples — the right to secure, wherever they 
can best be obtained, what are generally regarded as the essentials 
of a high standard of life. 

The present cry of the labor agitators for what they call a " liv- 
ing wage" means for the protectionist State one of two things: 
either it must tax itself to pay a scale of wages which will secure 
the desired well-being to the wage-earners within its borders, or 
it must make the wages actually paid capable of purchasing this 
well-being by opening home markets to the competition of the 
low-wage countries. This notion has already been so far enter- 
tained as to result in the admission, duty free, into all protectionist 
lands of such articles as are not of native growth or manufacture ; 
and the only plea for high protection which is now considered valid 
is based on the assumption that exorbitant duties are only tem- 
porary and must be removed as soon as the infant manufactures 
which they protect can walk alone and compete in the markets of 
the world. The spread of free-trade doctrine is everywhere con- 
terminous with the spread of free-trade ability. The criterion of 
personal and of national success is ultimately the same : power of 
any kind will create activity and a field for that activity ; and the 
greater the power, the wider the field which it will preempt. 
Apparently this has been true in spite of both artificial and so- 
called natural barriers. Human ability is shown by history to be 
like natural energy: personal or collective, it is infinitely trans- 
formable and can be directed into all channels. The mountain 
waterfall drives the trolley-car, which at the same time it both heats 
and lights ; the toil of the artisan and the laborer together with the 
enterprise of the manufacturer and the merchant, moves armies 
and fleets, secures settlements and markets in all lands, creates 
public and even cosmopolitan opinion — in short, directs the 
course of empire throughout the world. 



The Continental System 535 



§ 12. Evasions of the Continental System 

The effort of Great Britain to establish a monopoly of ocean 
commerce was accompanied by one immoral incident of the most 
far-reaching importance — the inauguration of a licensing system 
whereby, with simulated papers, vessels of any origin successfully 
evaded the provisions of both the British orders and the French 
decrees. This procedure for a time debauched the commerce 
of the world, and was a fit supplement to the acts of violence 
severely reprobated both then and since. In the main, fraud and 
violence brought greater profit to France than to Great Britain. 
The relaxation in 1798 of the rule of 1756 had accrued to the 
advantage of the only strict neutral power of the world, viz., the 
United States ; the orders and the decrees so hampered and exas- 
perated our merchants that we first passed the Embargo Act 
and then took refuge in non-intercourse. By that time English 
commerce had so seriously declined under the working of the Con- 
tinental System that violent agitation against the orders was in- 
augurated in Great Britain itself. Almost at that very moment, 
however, Napoleon drove the reigning house of Portugal to Brazil, 
and thus opened the most important ports of South America to 
British importations. The glut of the English storehouses was 
thus momentarily relieved; and, while the merchants suffered 
serious loss from the low prices they received, they were saved from 
absolute bankruptcy. For two years longer the struggle on both 
sides was continued with desperation, and would probably have 
resulted in the despair of Great Britain had not the improved 
methods of agriculture, introduced along with the improved 
methods in manufacturing, made it possible to feed for some time 
longer the still comparatively small population by means of home 
production. • 

§ 13. The Sources of British Strength 

This was the interval which brought matters to a crisis on the 
Continent. Great Britain could get on very well without the silks 
and other luxuries produced in France, substituting for them wool- 
lens and cottons ; but English cruisers made almost impossible the 
importation into Europe not only of colonial necessities, but also 
of the raw materials necessary for indispensable manufactures. 
By the system of licenses alone was it possible to maintain the 



$^6 English Historians 

French army; cloth and leather wherewith to outfit Napoleon's 
soldiers were brought from England into the Hanseatic ports in 
open contempt of the Continental System. Since Great Britain 
also held the monopoly of coffee, tea, and sugar, without which 
the not more than half-hearted Germans of the Rhine Confedera- 
tion would not live, and which Napoleon did not dare to cut off 
entirely from even the French and Italians, it was thought that 
the only possible reprisals against her not already instituted would 
be in the line of further restrictions on her manufactures. During 
the late summer and early autumn of 1810 were promulgated the 
three decrees of Trianon, St. Cloud, and Fontainebleau ; and not 
only were enormous duties imposed on all colonial products 
wherever found, but all English goods discovered in the lands of 
the French system were to be burnt. Neutral ships, including 
those of the United States, were at the same time utterly shut out 
from all the harbors of these lands. 

This was the beginning of the end ; for in the effort to destroy 
\ / the English sea power by condemning it to inanition, Napoleon 
deprived the manufacturers in his own lands of all their raw 
materials. Even if this had not been a sufficient cause, their 
manufacturing plants were not modern enough to have supplied 
the markets open to them. Russia endured the miseries of priva- 
tion for but a single year and in 181 1 opened her ports; while 
smuggling on her boundary lines at once assumed dimensions, 
which rendered anything approaching an administration of the 
Continental System the work of an army of customs officers, so 
that after 181 2 the effort to enforce it was necessarily abandoned. 
Our declaration of war with England came too late to exert any 
influence, one way or the other, on the final solution of the question 
whether sea power or land power was the stronger in the civilized 
world at the opening of this century. The death throes of Na- 
poleon's imperial system were primarily caused by the exhaustion 
of France and of himself ; when he made himself a dynastic ruler, 
his prestige and his inherent strength were dissipated as rapidly as 
were those of the popes when they joined the ranks of the petty 
princes of Italy. Possibly an empire of United Europe based on 
the liberal ideas of the day might have had some chance for life, 
but a single dynastic power pitted against all the dynasties of the 
Continent, and also against the moral strength of British pre- 
eminence in politics and industry, had none at all. It is a mis- 
take to regard the Continental System as an influential cause of 
Napoleon's overthrow, except in so far as it displayed the folly 



The Continental System 537 

of attempting to apply what is at best a temporary national ex- 
pedient as a permanent principle in a world system. The effort 
did cripple the resources of France and alienate much Continental 
sympathy from the Emperor, and it embittered Great Britain to the 
point of desperation; but the result of the struggle to found a 
Napoleonic hierarchy of two degrees on the States of the Continent 
was otherwise determined. It was decided by the national up- 
risings which began in Spain and ended with the consolidation of 
dynastic influence in the Holy Alliance. 

Bibliographical Note 

Rose, Napoleon and English Commerce, in the English Historical Re- 
view, 1893, pp. 704 ff. Lecky, History of England in the Eighteenth 
Century, Vol. VII, chap. xx. Fournier, Napoleon the First, consult the 
index under the title u Continental System." There is a useful collection of 
sources in the Pennsylvania Translations and Re prints, Vol. II, no. 2. Im- 
portant materials will be found also in Professor Anderson's Constitutions 
and Documents Illustrative of the History of France. The Cambridge 
Modern History, Vol. IX, chap, viii on the command of the sea, and 
chap, xiii on the Continental System. 



PART VIII 
THE AGE OF REFORM 

CHAPTER I 

THE OLD PARLIAMENTARY SYSTEM 

In its origin and development the Parliamentary system of 
England had never been shaped according to any logical or demo- 
cratic principles. On the eve of the great Reform Bill of 1832, 
it rested on customs which had grown up gradually and on statutes 
which had been passed to meet specific problems. Consequently 
it presented many grievances especially to the manufacturing and 
working classes which had sprung up as a result of the industrial 
revolution. The franchise was restricted and unequal, representa- 
tives were not apportioned according to population, and the gov- 
ernment was corrupt. It is of prime importance, therefore, that 
the old Parliamentary system should be studied as a preliminary 
to an understanding of the great measures which transformed 
England into a political democracy. 

§ 1 . Means of Communication and Politics i 

There is at the present time no town in either England or Wales 
which a man cannot reach in a twelve hours' journey from Lon- 
don. He may be whirled from the metropolis to York or from 
York to the metropolis in four hours. Two hundred years ago a 
gentleman would have thought himself fortunate if he had been 
able to reach London from Northumberland in a week. A coach 
in 1 706 undertook with the blessing of God to convey persons from 
London to York in four days. The facilities which roads and 

1 Walpole, History of England since 1815, Vol. I, pp. 114 ff. By per- 
mission of Longmans, Green, & Company, Publishers. 

538 



The Old Parliamentary System 539 

railways have afforded to travellers have indirectly led to an 
alteration in the composition of the House of Commons. Par- 
liamentary reform might have been almost indefinitely delayed, if 
it had not been for Telford, Brindley, and Stephenson. 

In the days when travelling was difficult and dangerous, the 
right of representation was of little value. A journey from Lon- 
don to Northumberland was a more hazardous operation than a 
journey to New York is now; and the burgesses, who were en- 
titled to send members to Parliament, found it difficult to obtain 
persons who were willing to act as their representatives. It be- 
came necessary to adopt the practice of making some allowance 
to the people who were thus selected, and the borough member 
became in consequence a paid delegate, and not an unpaid repre- 
sentative. In such a state of things the privilege of repre- 
sentation was naturally of little value. Places which had origi- 
nally enjoyed the right of returning members ceased to exercise 
it. Places in which the crown or some wealthy person had in- 
fluence were given the right, and no one ever questioned the 
power of the crown to grant it. The Tudor sovereigns created 
borough after borough; but the creations attracted no attention. 

The great contest of the seventeenth century fundamentally 
altered the position of the House of Commons. By asserting its 
right to exercise a decisive control over the government of the 
country, the House established its position and its influence. 
Almost at the same time some progress was made towards better, 
cheaper, and quicker travelling. Parliament complained that 
country gentlemen were coming to London, instead of staying 
at home. They failed to observe that the causes, which were col- 
lecting all the country gentlemen into one centre, were contribut- 
ing to increase the influence of the House of Commons. Yet there 
can hardly be a question that this was the case. The moment that 
it became the fashion for a country gentleman to spend a certain 
period of each year in London, all the apprehensions connected 
with the journey disappeared. No further difficulty was ex- 
perienced in obtaining members for each borough, and a seat in 
Parliament became of value from the social influence and the 
position which it gave. In the meanwhile other parts of England 
shared the increasing prosperity which was visible in the metropo- 
lis. New centres of industry acquired fresh importance, while 
the old boroughs, in which the county families had met together, 
either ceased to grow or began slowly to decay. 



540 English Historians 



§ 2. Population and Representation 

Population was slowly gravitating to particular centres; and 
the House of Commons, while the country was changing, suddenly 
resisted further changes in its constitution. Before the seven- 
teenth century the constitution of the House of Commons had been 
constantly altered. Henry VIII created seventeen new boroughs, 
Edward VI fourteen new boroughs, Mary ten new boroughs, 
Elizabeth twenty-four new boroughs, and James I four new 
boroughs. Charles II gave members to Durham and Newark; 
but, with this exception, no new borough was created, either in 
England or Wales, from the death of James I to the Reform Bill 
of 1832. The House of Commons, after the Restoration, took 
the issue of writs into its own hands, and declined to recognize 
those which had been issued by the crown. The constitution of 
the House of Commons was thus stereotyped, for the first time in 
English history, at the time at which the population of England 
was being collected in fresh centres. The representation of the 
people was becoming more unequal, and no attempt to redress 
the inequalities was made. 

At the period at which this history opens the House of Commons 
consisted of 658 members: 489 of these were returned by Eng- 
land, 100 by Ireland, 45 by Scotland, and 24 by Wales. The 
representation of England was more unequal than that of either 
of the other divisions of the kingdom. The 10 southern counties 
of England contained a population of about 2,900,000 souls, and 
returned 237 members to Parliament. The 30 other counties 
of England contained a population of more than 8,350,000 souls, 
and returned 252 members to Parliament. A little more than a 
fourth of the population returned very nearly one-half of the whole 
of the English representatives. Scotland contained a population 
of nearly 2,000,000 persons; Cornwall contained rather more than 
a quarter of a million of people. Yet all Scotland returned only 
45 members, while the county of Cornwall returned 44. 

Representation then bore no proportion to population; and 
the population, as a matter of fact, had little or nothing to do 
with the representation. It was stated in 1793 that the majority 
of the House of Commons was " elected by less than 15,000 
electors." Seventy members were elected by 34 places, in 
which "it would be to trifle with patience to mention any num- 
ber of voters whatever, the election being notoriously a mere 



The Old Parliamentary System 541 

matter of form." . . . Two hundred and ninety-four members, 
being a majority of the entire House of Commons in 1793, were 
returned by constituencies, none of which had 250 and in the 
great majority of which there were not 100 voters. There were not 
4000 electors in all Scotland. 

Fifteen thousand electors nominally returned a majority of the 
whole House of Commons in 1793. But the share which these ^^ 
15,000 individuals had in the election was purely nominal. One 
hundred and seventy-two of the English and Welsh members were 
returned on the direct nomination of the Treasury or of individuals, 
and 137 other members owed their return to the influence either 
of the Treasury or of individuals. The 45 Scotch members were 
nominated by 35 persons. Three hundred and fifty-four members 
were therefore returned on the recommendation of the Treasury 
or of some patron. The union with Ireland, in 1801, added 100 
members to the roll of the House of Commons. But 51 of these 
were returned by 36 peers, and 20 by 19 commoners. The union 
had increased the roll of the House to 658, and 424 of the 
658 members were returned either on the nomination, or on the 
recommendation of patrons. 

§ 3. Political Power of the Peers 

At the commencement of every session the House was in the 
habit of resolving that "it is a high infringement upon the liberties 
and privileges of the Commons of Great Britain, for any Lord of » / 
Parliament, or any Lord-Lieutenant of a county, to concern them- 
selves in the election of members to serve for the Commons in 
Parliament." Yet 245 members were notoriously returned by 
the influence of 128 peers. Lord Lonsdale, from returning nine 
members, was commonly known as "the premier's cat-o'-nine- 
tails." The Duke of Newcastle, Lord Buckingham, Lord Mount 
Edgecumbe, and Lord Eliot returned, in 1793, six members each. 
The Duke of Marlborough and Lord Fitzwilliam, five each. 
The Duke of Northumberland, the Duke of Bedford, the Duke 
of Rutland, Lord Ailesbury, and Lord Stafford, four each. 
The Duke of Beaufort, Lord Sandwich, Lord Foley, and Lord 
Uxbridge, three each. Such was the state of things in 1793. 

The strength of the great political peers did not lie in the boroughs 
alone. Many of the English counties returned, as a matter of 
course, the nominees of the great landowners. It was a common 
saying, attributed to Fox, that Yorkshire and Middlesex between 



542 English Historians 

them made all England. Yet, even in Yorkshire, the contest 
rather lay between the Lascelles and the Fitzwilliams than the 
aristocracy and the people. Up to 1780 the member for York- 
shire had always been elected in Lord Rockingham's dining room. 
If such was the state of things in Yorkshire, it is easy to imagine 
what occurred in less populous counties. A contested election in 
many counties was a rare occurrence. It was found in 1831 that 
there were no poll-books in Denbighshire. There had been no 
contest for a hundred years in Cheshire, in Nottinghamshire, and 
Cardiganshire. There had been no contest for nearly fifty years 
in Anglesey; and there had been no contest for twenty years 
in Derbyshire, Gloucestershire, Hertfordshire, Lancashire, Mon- 
mouthshire, Radnorshire, Flintshire, and Rutland. 

§ 4. Scotch and Irish Conditions 

The condition of the Scotch counties was even worse. In Eng- 
land every forty-shilling freeholder was a voter. Manufacturers, 
large tenant farmers, opulent and important inhabitants, were 
excluded from the franchise unless. they happened to possess a 
little land; but every landowner, not disqualified by religion, by 
age, or by sex, had a vote. But in Scotland the landowners had 
nothing whatever to do with the representation. The franchise 
was vested in the owners of superiorities; and these superiorities 
had the entire representation in their hands. Any owner of a 
superiority, producing £400 a year, was entitled to a vote; and 
the superiorities were cut up into different parcels of four hun- 
dred a year each, for the sake of giving votes. The owner of the 
superiority, as the direct grant from the crown was called, had 
not necessarily any land in the county; he did not necessarily 
reside in it, yet no one except the owner of a superiority was 
allowed a vote. 

The whole number of county electors in Scotland was variously 
estimated at from 2500 to 2900 persons. Fife was said to contain 
240 voters, Cromarty only 9 ! Scott mentions incidentally that 
young Harden was returned for Roxburghshire, at the memorable 
election of 1831, by a "great majority of 40 to 19"! Yet 
Roxburgh had a population of more than 40,000 persons. "The 
county of Bute, with a population of 14,000, had 21 electors, of 
whom only one resided in the county." "At an election at 
Bute, not beyond the memory of man," said the Lord Advocate 
in 1831, "only one person attended the meeting, except the 



The Old Parliamentary System 543 

sheriff and the returning officer. He, of course, took the chair, 
constituted the meeting, called over the roll of freeholders, answered 
to his own name, took the vote as to the preses, and elected him- 
self. He then moved and seconded his own nomination, put the 
question to the vote, and was unanimously returned." . . . 

§ 5. Borough Constituencies 

It was, however, in the boroughs that the great governing fami- 
lies exercised their chief authority. The borough constituency 
varied in different places. In some boroughs in England and Wales, 
and in every borough in Scotland, the members were returned 
by the corporation. The corporations were, at that time (181 5), 
unreformed; they were usually self-elected, and the provisions 
of the Test Act effectually excluded all Roman Catholics from 
sitting upon them. In some places in England and Wales the 
members were returned by the inhabitants paying scot and lot, 
or in other words by the ratepayers; while in other places the 
potwallers or potwallopers — or all the resident inhabitants who 
paid for their own subsistence — had a vote. In some places, 
again, the franchise was divided among these various classes. 

This variety of franchise created almost endless confusion. 
"Your honorable house," said the petitioners of 1793, "is but too 
well acquainted with the tedious, intricate, and expensive scenes 
of litigation which have been brought before you in attempting to>/^ 
settle the legal import of those numerous distinctions which per- 
plex and confound the present rights of voting. How many 
months of your valuable time have been wasted in listening to the 
wrangling of lawyers upon the various species of burgagehold, 
leasehold, and freehold. How many committees have been occu- 
pied in investigating the nature of scot and lot, potwallers, com- 
monalty, populacy, resiant inhabitants, and inhabitants at large. 
What labor and research have been employed in endeavoring to 
ascertain the legal claim of boroughmen, aldermen, portmen, 
selectmen, burgesses, and councilmen; and what confusion has 
arisen from the complicated operation of clashing charters, from 
freemen, resident and non-resident, and from the different modes 
of obtaining the freedom of corporations by birth, by servitude, 
by marriage, by redemption, by election, and by purchase." Com- 
plicated, however, as these tenures were, there was one charac- 
teristic which was common to nearly all of them. The patron 
exercised an unbounded influence in the borough. In some cases 



544 English Historians 

the corporation, in other cases the inhabitants, in others again 
the ratepayers, nominally elected the members. Corporation, 
inhabitants, ratepayers, were all agreed in voting for the patron's 
nominee. 

A few prominent examples will illustrate the position of the old 
boroughs. Lord Beverly's borough of Beeralston had only one 
house in it rated at over £10 a year; Mr. Bankes' borough of 
Corfe Castle was a cluster of cottages round a venerable ruin. 
Lord Calthorpe's borough of Bramber was an agricultural dis- 
trict inhabited by about ioo persons. Lord Monson's borough 
of Gatton was a gentleman's park. Lord Caledon's borough of 
Old Sarum was a green mound. Lord Huntingfield's borough of 
Dunwich had been submerged for centuries beneath the North 
Sea. There were 13 electors in Malmesbury, none of whom 
could write. The 19 electors of Helston voted unanimously 
with the Duke of Leeds. There were 310 electors in Arundel, 
but 195 voted with the Duke of Norfolk. At the general election 
of 1 81 8 Lord Falmouth on one side, and the regent on the other, 
made the utmost endeavor to carry Truro. After a ruinous con- 
test, Lord Falmouth's candidates polled 12; the regent's, 11 votes. 
These examples were, at the time, so notorious, that grave men 
thought that there was nothing ludicrous in gravely stating them. 
It seems hardly to have occurred to the politicians of that time that 
there was anything ridiculous in the mention of a contest between 
12 electors on the one side and 11 on the other. 

§ 6. The Traffic in Boroughs 

The borough owners disposed of their property in different 
ways. All of them acted on the blunt maxim which the Duke of 
Newcastle propounded in 1829, "Have I not the right to do what 
I like with my own ? " But, though they were probably unanimous 
in agreeing with the duke, they did not all carry out their theory 
in the same manner. Some borough owners simply sold their 
boroughs to the highest bidder. Ten thousand pounds was com- 
monly offered for the two seats during a single Parliament. Other 
borough owners again sold their seats, at a regular price, to mem- 
bers of their own party. Lord Mount Edgecumbe, for instance, 
used to receive ^2000 from each of his candidates for Lostwithiel. 
Some portion of the £4000 which he thus received was distributed 
by him as plate money to the 20 or 30 electors of the bor- 
ough. Another portion was devoted to local objects and to 



The Old Parliamentary System 545 

subsidizing the borough funds. The residue found its way to the 
patron's pocket. Other borough owners placed their patronage 
at the disposal of their party, or nominated their own relations or 
their own friends. An act was, indeed, passed in 1809 to stop this 
traffic, but the traffic still continued. It was stated in a petition 
to the House of Commons in 181 7 that seats were bought and sold 
like tickets in the opera. The best men saw nothing disgraceful 
in breaking the law and in buying a seat. Romilly declared in 
1805 ^at he -had formed "an unalterable resolution never to come 
into Parliament," unless he held a public office, "but by a popular 
election or by paying the common price" for his seat. Ricardo 
was nominated for Portarlington, in return for a loan of £40,000 
or £50,000 with which he accommodated the patron of the bor- 
ough. . . . 

§ 7. Bribery and Sale of Representation 

The whole of the boroughs, however, were not at the disposal 
of any patron. In some places the constituency was free to return 
a candidate of its own choice. A few of the largest towns really 
prided themselves on securing the success of what was called a 
popular candidate, but even these places were disgraced by scenes 
which now seem incredible. Lord J. Russell stated in the House 
of Commons in 1831 that if an intelligent foreigner were taken to 
a great and opulent town, Liverpool for instance, "he would see 
bribery prevail to the greatest extent; he would see men openly 
paid for their votes." An election in Westminster involved a fort- 
night of riot and drunkenness. When Brougham stood for Liver- 
pool it was recorded that two or three men were killed, but that 
the town was quiet. A riot, in which only two or three men lost 
their lives, was thought hardly worth noticing. "By long-estab- 
lished custom the single vote of a resident elector at Hull was 
rewarded with a donation of two guineas; four were paid for a 
plumper; and the expenses of a freeman's journey from London 
averaged £10 apiece. The letter of the law was not broken, 
because the money was not paid till the last day on which election 
petitions could be presented." At Stafford £7 was given for a 
single vote, £14 for a plumper, to be paid for about a twelvemonth 
after the election. "The price of votes (at Maidstone) was as 
regularly fixed as the price of bread — so much for a single vote 
and so much for a plumper." There were about two hundred 
and forty electors at Abingdon, seventy of whom took money. 

2N 



546 English Historians 

Lord Cochrane admitted in the House of Commons that after 
his return for Honiton, he sent the town crier around the bor- 
ough to tell the voters to go to the chief banker for £10 105. each. 
In 1766 Sudbury shamelessly offered itself for sale. In 1768 the 
corporation of Oxford sold the representation of the city to the 
Duke of Marlborough and Lord Abingdon. In 1826 the bor- 
ough of Leicester spent ;£ 10,000 in securing the election of a 
political partisan. . . . 

Bribery and drunkenness were encouraged by the law which 
protracted the taking of the poll. Rapid polling was indeed im- 
possible. In 1807, for example, the poll clerk at Horsham had 
to take "down the description of every burgage tenement from 
the deeds of the voters." Only seventy-three electors were polled, 
but the complicated process occupied the greater part of two days. 
It may easily be imagined that in larger constituencies a process 
of this kind must have taken not days but weeks; and the law 
allowed the poll to be open for weeks. At the general election of 
1784 the contest for Westminster continued for upwards of six 
weeks, and was followed by a scrutiny which lasted for the best 
part of a year. But the scandals connected with this election were 
too great even for the politicians of the eighteenth century. A law 
was passed "limiting every poll to fifteen days, and closing a 
scrutiny within thirty days after the close of the poll." But this 
law, though it undoubtedly constituted a great reform, still per- 
mitted the most inordinate expenditure. In the great struggles 
in 1807, when Wilberforce, Lord Milton, and Lascelles were 
engaged in a triangular contest for the representation of Yorkshire, 
the poll was kept open for the full legal period of fifteen days, and 
Lord Milton and Lascelles spent between them ^200,000. The 
lavish expenditure, inseparable from a contested election in a 
popular constituency, increased the influence of a few territorial 
magnates. It was hardly worth any man's while to waste a fortune 
on a single contest; and the expense of a county election gave, 
therefore, a monopoly of the representation to a few great families. 

Bribery was indirectly encouraged by another circumstance. 
In theory everybody reprobated it ; in practice everybody laughed 
at it. Up to 1770 election petitions were tried in the whole 
House, and the decision of the House was avowedly pronounced 
on party grounds, and had no reference to the merits of the case. 
Sir Robert Walpole was driven from office by an adverse vote on 
the Chippenham election petition. In 1770 George Grenville 
persuaded Parliament to adopt a little better system. Under the 



The Old Parliamentary System 547 

Grenville Act a committee was appointed to try the election. 
Forty-nine members were chosen by ballot ; each party to the peti- 
tion had the right of objecting to eighteen of these names; the 
remaining thirteen, associated with two others, one of whom was 
nominated on either side of the House, constituted the tribunal 
to determine the election. The Grenville committees, as they 
were commonly called, were far better tribunals than the whole 
House for determining the legality of an election. But the Gren- 
ville committees were as much influenced as the House had been 
by party considerations. In a committee of fifteen members one 
party or the other was necessarily in the majority, and the mem- 
bers usually voted with their political friends and disregarded 
their own conclusions. A tribunal of this description was not 
likely to stamp out bribery; and bribery consequently continued 
unchecked and unreproved. 

§ 8. The Spoils oj Office 

At the time, then, at which this history commences, the con- 
stituencies were divisible into two classes: some places were 
notoriously corrupt; others were notoriously in the hands of the 
landed interest. The class which thus enjoyed a monopoly of 
political power obtained its full share of the good things of this 
world. A political career was indeed a lottery, but it was a lottery 
in which the prizes were very large, and in which even moderate 
success was rewarded with extravagant liberality. A successful 
politician could easily insure his own affluence, and could usually 
obtain a comfortable provision for his children. Lord Grenville, 
on retiring in 1801, secured a pension of £1500 a year for Lady 
Grenville. Yet Lord Grenville was auditor of the Exchequer, a 
sinecure producing £4000 a year, and his younger brother, Thomas 
Grenville, received upwards of £2000 a year as one of the chief 
justices in eyre. The Duke of Portland succeeded Lord Gren- 
ville. His son, Lord William Bentinck, received £1131 as clerk 
of the pipe in the Exchequer, and £2511 as colonel of the nth 
Dragoons. . . . 

These are a few instances of the extravagant provisions which 
successful politicians and successful lawyers were allowed to make 
for their posterity or for themselves. It would be easy to extend 
the list to an almost indefinite length. It is difficult to define the 
duties of a teller of the Exchequer, yet four tellers of the Exchequer 
drew no less than ^2600 a year each. No duties of special 



548 English Historians 

importance were attached to the registrarship of the Court of Ad- 
miralty; yet Lord Arden, the registrar, drew at least £10,000 a 
year. The chief clerkship of the House of Commons would have 
been adequately paid with £2000 a year, and the fees of the office 
amounted to six times that sum. The fees of the clerk of the 
pleas in Ireland amounted to £10,000 a year; his deputy received 
no less than £7000, not one shilling of which, according to a high 
authority, was legal. 

Pensions and places were not the only rewards at the disposal 
of successful statesmen and successful lawyers. Peerages were 
granted with a prodigality which exceeds belief, and pensions 
were in their turn bestowed to support the peerages which had thus 
been created. "The far greater part of the peers," wrote Queen 
Caroline to George IV in 1820, "hold by themselves and their 
families offices, pensions, and emoluments, solely at the will and 
pleasure of your Majesty. There are more than four-fifths of 
the peers in this situation ! " " More than half of the present House 
of Lords," said Wilberforce in 181 1, "has been created or gifted 
with their titles since I came into Parliament in 1780." "No 
great thinkers, no great writers, no great orators, no great states- 
men, none of the true nobility of the land, were to be found among 
the spurious nobles created by George III." They consisted 
chiefly of "mere lawyers" and "country gentlemen remarkable 
for nothing but their wealth, and the number of votes their wealth 
enabled them to control." 



Bibliographical Note 

Porritt, The Unrejormed House of Commons. May, Constitutional His- 
tory of England, consult index under titles " Parliament, " and" Commons." 
Lecky, History of England, consult index under the title "Parliament." 
Kent, The English Radicals. Daly, The Dawn of Radicalism. 



CHAPTER II 

THE REFORM BILL OF 1 83 2 

The undemocratic and curious political conditions described 
in the previous chapter had long been the subject of comment by 
statesmen and philosophers ; in Cromwell's time an attempt had 
been made at Parliamentary reform by giving representatives to 
larger towns and striking small boroughs from the list. This 
reform, which Clarendon thought worthy of a better time, was 
cancelled on the accession of the Stuarts. From the middle of the 
eighteenth century, however, Parliamentary reform was the sub- 
ject of agitation. After the close of the Napoleonic wars the 
contest for reform was continued with almost revolutionary fervor, 
and in 1830 it became apparent to the governing classes that 
further opposition was dangerous. Wellington, the great cham- 
pion of the old order, was forced to resign in favor of the Grey 
ministry dominated by Whigs and moderates. 

§ 1 . Introduction of the Reform Bill by Lord John Russell * 

The Cabinet decided that the Reform Bill should be introduced 
by Russell, the paymaster of the forces. Various reasons induced 
them to arrive at this decision. Russell had for more than ten 
years actively promoted the reform of Parliament. A bill which 
was brought forward on his responsibility was, therefore, sure of 
favorable consideration from the Reformers. Russell, moreover, 
was a younger son of the Duke of Bedford; the duke was one of 
the largest territorial magnates in the country; he was the pro- 
prietor of rotten boroughs, and a bill recommended by his son's 
authority was likely to reassure timid or wavering politicians. 
Something was, indeed, necessary to infuse spirit into the hearts 

1 Walpole, History of England since 1815, Vol. Ill, chap. xi. By per- 
mission of Longmans, Green, & Company, Publishers. 

549 



550 English Historians 

of the Reformers in Parliament. Outside the House a crowd of 
people, anxiously collected throughout the greater portion of the 
day, testified their anxiety for the success of the measure which 
was about to be introduced. But inside the House, Russell was 
confronted by a compact body of Tories, anxious to learn what the 
ministry were about to propose, but ready to forget their own 
differences in their dislike for all reform. Those who had expected 
a great declamatory speech from the introducer of the measure 
were disappointed. Russell told his tale in the plainest language. 
But the tale which he had to tell required no extraordinary elo- 
quence to adorn it. The Radicals had not dared to expect, the 
Tories, in their wildest fears, had not apprehended, so complete 
a measure. Enthusiasm was visible on one side of the House; 
consternation and dismay on the other. At last, when Russell 
read the list of boroughs which were doomed to extinction, the 
Tories hoped that the completeness of the measure would insure 
its defeat. Forgetting their fears, they began to be amused, and 
burst into peals of derisive laughter. 

§ 2. Debate on the Bill 

Men of large experience believed that if Peel had risen the 
moment Russell sat down, and had declined to discuss a bill 
which was not a measure of "reform but of revolution," the House 
would have refused to allow the bill to be introduced. It is very 
unlikely, however, that such a result would have ensued. Tory 
members, like Inglis, had come down to the House primed with 
arguments to prove that little fishing villages in Cornwall were 
better qualified to return members than the great manufacturing 
towns of Yorkshire and Lancashire. Tory members, like Inglis, 
who had searched through Camden and Hatsell, Henry and Rapin, 
Hallam and Burke, who had telling quotations in their pockets 
from Home Tooke's writings and Canning's speeches, would hardly 
have consented to waste all their labor by smothering the new-born 
infant in the hour of its birth. The House, instead of dividing, 
talked through the night and adjourned till the morrow. The 
debate, thus adjourned, was protracted over seven nights; but 
every fresh adjournment strengthened the hands of the ministry 
and weakened those of the Opposition. The measure, which had 
excited derision in the House, was received with enthusiasm out 
of doors. Resolutions supporting the bill were passed at monster 
meetings in all the large towns. Moderate members, warned by 



The Reform Bill of 1832 551 

the attitude of the country, declined to commit themselves to an un- 
compromising opposition to it ; and the bill, which might possibly 
have been thrown out on the 1st of March, was read a first time 
without a division on the 9th. 

The Tories, however, had neither reconciled themselves to the 
bill nor withdrawn their opposition to it. The second reading 
was fixed for Monday, the 21st of March. On the preceding 
Friday the government was defeated on the timber duties, and the 
thoroughness of the defeat raised the drooping spirits of the Oppo- 
sition. Ministers, indeed, hoped for a considerable majority upon 
the second reading; but, like prudent men, they desired to prepare 
for the consequences of defeat, and to obtain the king's permission, 
in that contingency, to dissolve Parliament. The king, however, 
shrank from the proposal to appeal to an excited population, and 
could not bring himself to face the consequences of a general 
election either in England or in Ireland. Ministers failed to ob- 
tain the permission, which they again and again urged him to 
give them. Happily, however, dissolution at that stage did not 
become necessary. After two nights' debate the bill was read a 
second time by 302 votes to 301, or by a narrow majority of one. 
The pressure of public opinion had thus defeated the united efforts 
of all the boroughmongers. The representatives of great con- 
stituencies, like Sir Thomas Acland, the member for Devonshire, 
and Mr. Wilson Patten, who had lately been returned for Lan- 
cashire, felt the full force of the popular movement, and voted for 
the bill. Even Charles Wynn, who had been frightened by the 
immensity of the scheme into resigning his office in the ministry, 
silently supported it; and the necessity for the dissolution was for 
the moment avoided. 

§ 3. Defeat of the Government and Dissolution 

The majority by which the bill had been read a second time was 
so small that the ministry could hardly hope to carry the measure 
through its later stages. Prudent men, who disliked reform, 
but dreaded the alternative of a popular commotion, hoped that 
the bill might be silently rejected by an adverse division in com- 
mittee. The bill, however, was not destined to survive to this 
stage. Gascoyne, the member for Liverpool, proposed a pre- 
liminary resolution that the number of representatives in England 
and Wales should not be diminished. It was obvious that the 
whole strength of the Tory party would rally in Gascoyne's sup- 



552 English Historians 

port, and the ministry accordingly decided to meet the motion by 
a slight concession. Five boroughs were taken out of Schedule A 
and transferred to Schedule B. Seven boroughs were taken out 
of Schedule B. 1 Eight counties and seven large towns were given 
an additional member, and additional members were awarded to 
Ireland and to one other large town. But these concessions did 
not conciliate the Opposition. Men like Sir Thomas Acland, Mr. 
Wilson Patten, and Charles Wynn, who had supported the gov- 
ernment on the second reading, ventured on opposing it on Gas- 
coyne's motion, and the ministry was accordingly defeated by 
299 votes to 291. 

This division, which took place on the 19th of April, proved 
fatal to the Reform Bill and to the Parliament of 1830. The 
Cabinet, on the following morning, decided on recommending a 
dissolution. The king, after four-and-twenty hours' considera- 
tion, gave his consent to it. The ministers at once announced 
that the bill would not be proceeded with, and endeavored to go 
on with the ordinary business of the evening. The Opposition, 
however, declined to enter into the discussion of the estimates, 
which happened to be before the House, and raised a confused 
and desultory debate on reform. The night wore away; supply 
had not been granted; and the Opposition, showing no signs of 
concession, moved the adjournment of the debate. The motion 
was met with all the resistance which ministers could offer to it; 
but the defeat of the previous evening had lessened their influence. 
They were beaten by 164 votes to 142, and the adjournment was 
consequently carried. 

The division hastened the dissolution, which in any event would 
have taken place. Before the debate was closed Althorp sent 
word to Grey that the supplies could not be obtained, and that, 
in his opinion, the dissolution ought to take place at once. Grey 
happened to be dining, with several other members of the Cabinet, 
with his son-in-law, Durham. A council was immediately held, 
at which it was decided to act on Althorp's advice. A messenger 
was at once sent to the king; and the king, on the same evening, 
approved the dissolution. Orders were accordingly given to the 
clerk of the council directing him the next day to bring to the palace 
the papers which are required when Parliament is to be dissolved 
by commission. But, on the following morning, the Cabinet dis- 

1 Schedule A contained a list of boroughs completely disfranchised; 
Schedule B those semi-disfranchised. 






The Reform Bill of 1832 $53 

covered that this arrangement would not be satisfactory. Lord 
Wharncliffe had given notice of a motion for an address to the 
crown against a dissolution. The Opposition peers had made up 
their minds to carry this address, and the ministry was equally 
desirous to prevent its adoption. If Parliament, however, were 
prorogued by commission, the adoption of the address could not 
be prevented. Before admitting the commissioners the House of 
Lords was entitled to dispose of the business before it; and the 
Opposition peers could not, therefore, be stopped, unless the king 
himself consented to dissolve Parliament in person. Fortunately 
for the ministry, the king's consent was easily procured. However 
much he had originally disliked the proposal for a dissolution, he 
disliked much more the attempt which was to be made in the House 
of Lords to interfere with his prerogative to dissolve. He declared 
that he would go himself at once; that, if his carriages could not 
be got ready, he would go in a hackney-coach. Trumpery diffi- 
culties, raised by some of his household, about preparing the state 
carriages and plaiting the horses' manes, might have proved im- 
passable mountains in the reign of George — they were only" 
molehills in the reign of William. 

On the afternoon on which the dissolution took place the House 
of Lords met at two, the House of Commons at half-past two. 
The impending dissolution had just become known, and both 
houses were the scene of disorder and confusion rarely witnessed 
in Parliament. In the House of Commons the violence was suffi- 
ciently marked. In the House of Lords the peers were nearly 
coming to blows. Wharncliffe had barely time to read his motion 
before his speech was stopped by shouts of "The king !" Brougham 
increased the uproar by angrily declaring that the House of Com- 
mons had thought fit to take the extreme and unprecedented step 
of refusing the supplies. The complaint only increased the anger 
of the Tories. Brougham was hooted. Londonderry shook his 
fist at Richmond. The peeresses who had come to look at the 
king trembled in the gallery. The king himself, alarmed at the 
uproar, hesitated for a moment to enter the House. Brougham, 
however, easily persuaded him that the indecorous uproar would 
be hushed by his presence. He came, and told his turbulent 
legislators that he had come to prorogue the Parliament, with a 
view to its immediate dissolution. 



554 English Historians 



§ 4. The Election and the New Parliament 

The consternation of the Opposition at the sudden dissolution 
of the Parliament of 1830 was exceeded by the enthusiasm which 
was created by the news of it in the country : London was illumi- 
nated; Tory peers had their windows broken by the mob; and 
even the great services of Wellington did not protect Apsley 
House from damage. Every one was required to illuminate, and 
duke or citizen who failed to manifest his participation in the 
universal elation had to pay the penalty for his indifference to the 
general rejoicing. The illumination of the streets of London was, 
however, only one symptom of the general excitement. From 
John-o'-Groat's to the Land's End a cry was raised of "The 
bill, the whole bill, and nothing but the bill." Printed lists were 
circulated, stating the manner in which each member had voted 
on Gascoyne's motion. Every one who. had directly or indirectly 
opposed reform incurred the full animosity of the populace. 
Gascoyne himself was defeated at Liverpool; Sir Robert Wilson, 
an ardent Reformer on most points, lost his seat at Southwark for 
having supported Gascoyne. County members like Vyvyan, the 
member for Cornwall, Knatchbull, the member for Kent, and 
Bankes, the member for Dorsetshire, were replaced by Reformers. 
Even the influence of the boroughmongers was lost in the crisis. 
For the first time Newcastle found himself unable to do what he 
liked with his own. His candidates were defeated at Newark, 
at Bassetlaw, and in Nottinghamshire. Lonsdale proved almost 
equally powerless in Cumberland. The mighty force of popular 
opinion, bursting the bonds by which it had been controlled, swept 
political power out of the hands of the boroughmongers and 
transferred it to the people. 

The general election which thus took place in the summer of 
183 1 in reality completed the triumph of the Reformers. The 
legislature had still to register the verdict of the country, but it 
had not the slightest chance of reversing it. . . . 

The new Parliament was formally opened on the 21st of June. 
Three days afterwards, on the 24th of June, Russell introduced 
the second Reform Bill. But his position had been materially 
altered since he had been intrusted with the original bill, nearly 
four months before. His services had been properly rewarded by 
his admission to the Cabinet. His courage had been proportion- 
ately raised by the enthusiasm and strength of his supporters. 



The Reform Bill of 1832 555 

He no longer spoke with the hesitation and diffidence which had 
marked his introduction of the original Reform Bill. But he had 
no concessions to offer. The country had demanded the bill, the 
whole bill, and nothing but the bill ; and the ministry had decided 
on the re-introduction of the bill without material amendment. 
Fifty-four boroughs had been doomed to disfranchisement, forty- 
four boroughs to semi-disfranchisement, in the latest edition of 
the original bill. The new bill proposed the disfranchisement of 
fifty-seven boroughs and the semi-disfranchisement of forty others. 
Both bills, therefore, contemplated the same measure of disfran- 
chisement. Both bills proposed the enfranchisement of the same 
great towns. The ministry had, therefore, adhered to all the 
salient features of their original plan. The Opposition was no 
longer able, however, to pursue its previous tactics. In March 
the motion for the introduction of the bill had been carried after 
seven nights' debate; the second reading had been carried after 
two nights' debate by a majority of only one. In June leave for 
the introduction of the bill was granted after one night's discussion, 
and the second reading was carried on the morning of the 8th of 
July by a majority of one hundred and thirty-six. 

The majority was so large, the enthusiasm of the House of Com- 
mons was so great, that the ministry might fairly hope for the rapid 
passage of the measure through its future stages. The Opposi- 
tion, however, exhausted the forms of Parliament to delay a pro- 
posal which it was no longer doubtful that it was unable to defeat. 
On the 12th of July, Russell moved that the House should go into 
committee upon the bill. The committee lasted for forty nights 
and did not conclude its labors till the 7th of September. No 
material alterations in the measure were effected by the committee. 
The old borough of Saltash was transferred from Schedule A to 
Schedule B. Ashton and Stroud were each given a member; 
two Welsh counties, Carmarthen and Denbigh, an additional mem- 
ber each; and the right of voting was extended, on the motion of 
Lord Chandos, to ^50 occupiers in counties. These slight altera- 
tions hardly rewarded the Opposition for its persistent labors. 
Night after night had been wasted with an objectless discussion, 
which only irritated the country and wearied the government. 
On the first of the forty nights, motions for adjournment were 
again and again repeated, and the Opposition did not finally give 
way till eight o'clock on the following morning. Happily for the 
comfort of the legislature, the example which was thus set by an 
irritated minority was not followed for another forty-six years. 



$$6 English Historians 

Delay was hardly tolerated within the walls of Parliament. 
Outside the walls of Parliament the people watched with ill- 
disguised impatience the tactics of the Opposition. They could 
not understand why the discussion of a measure which was accept- 
able to a large majority of the House of Commons, and to nine 
men out of every ten in the country, should be protracted over forty 
nights. At the commencement of August the Birmingham Political 
Union marked its sense of the delays by petitioning the House to 
accelerate the passage of the bill. The House declined to accept 
the petition which complained of "a factious and puerile opposi- 
tion" by "a small and interested minority." But the petition, 
though it was rejected, did its work. The committee steadily 
applied itself to the details of the measure. A proposal, made by 
Hunt, for the enfranchisement of all ratepayers, was defeated by 
a majority of 123 votes to 1 ; a suggestion by Hume for the repre- 
sentation of the colonies was rejected without a division. On the 
7th of September the bill was reported ; on the 13th the report was 
considered; on the 19th the bill was read a third time without 
discussion; and finally, on the 21st of September, it was passed, 
after three nights' debate, by 345 votes to 236. . . . 

§ 5. The Bill in the House of Lords 

The satisfaction which the coronation gave probably facilitated 
the progress of the Reform Bill through its later stages in the House 
of Commons. But the recollection of the gay scene was effaced 
before the bill reached the House of Lords on the 22nd of Septem- 
ber. The formal proceedings which are customary when a bill is 
carried from one house to the other were, on this occasion, watched 
with breathless anxiety; and the Commons, instead of retiring 
from the bar, waited till the second reading of the bill had been 
fixed for Monday, the 3rd of October. The debate which com- 
menced on that day was one of the most memorable which had 
ever occurred in the House of Lords. It was opened by a minister 
who was able to avow that he stood before their lordships "the 
advocate of principles from which" he had "never swerved," and 
that he was only proposing in his old age the measure which he 
had promoted in his youth. Grey's commanding eloquence had 
never been exerted with more effect than in this debate. Chan- 
cellor and ex-chancellor vied with each other, towards the close of 
it, in speeches of unusual power. Brougham actually supplicated 
his brother peers on his knees to pass the bill. Consummate actor 



The Reform Bill of 1832 557 

that he was, he made the common mistake of overacting his part, 
and became ridiculous when he intended to be sublime. Lynd- 
hurst, in a speech of marked ability, replied to Brougham's dec- 
lamation; and after a few desultory speeches from dukes and 
prelates, and an eloquent reply from Grey, the peers rejected the 
second reading of the measure by 199 votes to 158. 

The memorable division took place about six o'clock in the 
morning on Saturday, the 8th of October. The newspapers, a 
few hours afterwards, announced it to the discontented capital. 
The Chronicle and the Sun appeared in mourning. The Times, 
in its short leading article, declared that it turned from "the appall- 
ing sight of a wounded nation to the means already in action for 
recovery." The means were sufficiently formidable. The Com- 
mon Council of the city at once met in support of the measure. 
Those members of the House of Commons who had supported 
the bill passed a vote of confidence in the government. London, 
however, appeared apathetic when its action was contrasted with 
that of the country. The news of the division reached Birming- 
ham at five o'clock in the afternoon. The bells were immediately 
muffled and tolled. The mob at Derby, irritated at the announce- 
ment, broke out into open riot. The jail at Nottingham was 
burnt down. Two troops of Kentish yeomanry tendered their 
resignation because their commanding officers, Lord Sydney and 
Lord Winchilsea, had voted against the bill; and meetings were 
held in almost every county to support the government. 

§ 6. Macaulay's Speech on Reform 

There was, however, one satisfaction for the Reformers. The 
Chronicle had assured them, in its black-edged columns, that "the 
triumph of the wicked does not endure forever," and the triumph 
of the Opposition promised to be equally short-lived. The House 
of Commons had hardly reassembled on the Monday before 
Ebrington proposed a resolution lamenting the fate of the Reform 
Bill, and expressing unabated confidence in the ministry. The 
motion was resisted by Goulburn, on the part of the Opposition. 
But neither Ebrington nor Goulburn succeeded in instilling any 
enthusiasm into the House. Among the more recent additions 
to the House of Commons, however, there was a young orator 
whose eloquence was equal to his ardor, and whose ardor was 
stimulated by his knowledge. Thomas Babington Macaulay was 
born in 1800. He entered Parliament for Lord Lansdowne's 



558 English Historians 

borough of Calne in February, 1830. He only spoke twice during 
the memorable session which was abruptly concluded by the death 
of George IV. He had done nothing which gave him any right 
to expect office in Grey's ministry, and when the Whig administra- 
tion was formed, his claims were overlooked. Yet the introduction 
of the Reform Bill raised him at once to eminence. His first 
speech on the second reading of the first bill reminded the older 
members who heard it of the days of Fox, Pitt, and of Canning. 
His next speech, <on the second reading of the second bill, con- 
firmed the great impression which his first speech had made. He 
rose after Goulburn to support Ebrington's motion. Goulburn 
had endeavored to limit the debate to a discussion of the measures 
of the government, — the timber duties, the coal duties, the sugar 
duties. Macaulay brushed away the cobwebs which Goulburn had 
woven as mere trifling and recalled the House to the one subject 
which was before it: "At the present moment I can see only one 
question in the State — the question of reform ; only two parties 
— the friends of the bill and its enemies. . . . The public 
enthusiasm is undiminished. Old Sarum has grown no bigger; 
Manchester has grown no smaller. ... I know only two ways 
in which societies can be governed, — by public opinion and by 
the sword. A government having at its command the armies, 
the fleets, and the revenues of Great Britain might possibly hold 
Ireland by the sword. So Oliver Cromwell held Ireland; so 
William the Third held it ; so Mr. Pitt held it ; so the Duke of 
Wellington might perhaps have held it. But to govern Great 
Britain by. the sword — so wild a thought has never, I will venture 
to say, occurred to any public man of any party. But if not by 
the sword, how is the country to be governed ? . . . In old times, 
when the villeins were driven to revolt by oppression, when a hun- 
dred thousand insurgents appeared in arms on Blackheath, the 
king rode up to them and exclaimed, 'I wilt be your leader!' 
and at once the infuriated multitude laid down their arms and 
dispersed at his command. Herein let us imitate him. Let us 
say to our countrymen: 'We are your leaders. Our lawful 
power shall be firmly exerted to the utmost in your cause; and 
our lawful power is such that it must finally prevail.' " 

Macaulay's speech had the merit of concentrating the attention 
of his audience on the main issue. The House, aroused by it into 
enthusiasm, passed Ebrington's resolution by a large majority; 
and the ministry, thus supported in its determination to persevere 
in the measure, obtained the king's assent to a short prorogation 



The Reform Bill of 1832 559 

of Parliament, and to the re-introduction of the Reform Bill, with 
such amendments as might be necessary, after the conclusion of 
the recess. The country was partly pacified by the assurance that 
the ministry intended to persevere. But the Political Unions dis- 
played an increasing determination to intimidate the peers. A 
vast meeting, which was said to have consisted of one hundred and 
fifty thousand persons, was held at Birmingham; resolutions 
were passed at it that no taxes should be paid if the Reform Bill 
were rejected ; and thanks were unanimously voted at it to Althorp 
and Russell. In the midst of this excitement, and the angry 
feelings which it generated, Parliament was prorogued. . . . 

§ 7. Introduction of the Third Reform Bill 

During the whole of the short Parliamentary recess men brooded 
over the prospects of the coming session. Parliament, which had 
been prorogued on the 20th of October, met again on the 6th of [^ 
December. Six days afterwards, or on Monday the 12th, Russell 
introduced the third Reform Bill. The third Reform Bill was 
constructed on different principles from either of its predecessors. 
It was determined to disfranchise wholly fifty-six boroughs, return- 
ing one hundred and eleven members ; it was decided to deprive 
thirty other boroughs of half of their representatives. The boroughs 
which were marked for disfranchisement were selected on a new 
principle. Regard was paid to the population of the smaller 
towns, the number of houses in them, and the amount which they 
respectively paid in assessed taxes. From these various sources 
the list of the condemned boroughs was prepared. The change of 
method, however, made no material difference in Schedule A. 
One or two boroughs escaped disfranchisement ; one or two others 
were added to the list ; but Schedule A for all practical purposes 
was unaffected. A material difference, however, was made in Sched- 
ule B. In the first bill forty-six boroughs had been included in 
this schedule. In the second bill forty boroughs, which were subse- 
quently increased to forty-one, were named in it. But in the third 
bill only thirty boroughs were selected for partial disfranchise- 
ment. The milder measure of disfranchisement was possible, 
because, in another respect, the ministry had modified its original 
scheme. In the former bills it had contemplated a considerable 
reduction in the number of the House of Commons. In the bill 
of December it preserved the number of six hundred and fifty- 
eight members which had composed it since the Irish Union. 



560 English Historians 

This decision enabled the Cabinet not merely to save a few bor- 
oughs from disfranchisement, but also to enfranchise a greater 
number of thriving towns. The former process pacified the feel- 
ings of the Opposition ; the latter undoubtedly increased the effi- 
ciency of the measure. 

The bill which was thus introduced was at once read a first 
time. It passed its second reading after two nights' debate on the 
Friday following by a majority of exactly two to one. The House, 
having made this satisfactory progress with the measure, adjourned 
for the Christmas holidays till the 17th of January. After the 
recess twenty-two nights' work enabled the government to carry 
the bill through committee. On the 22nd of March it was read a 
third time ; and finally, on the 23rd of March, it passed the House 
of Commons without a division. 

§ 8. Pressure on the House of Lords 

One branch of the legislature had given a convincing proof of 
\J its desire for reform ; but no one had ever questioned the fidelity 
of the House of Commons to the cause of the people. The second 
Reform Bill had been lost through the action of the peers, and 
there was no reason to suppose that the peers had modified their 
views on the subject. There was, however, one way by which the 
House of Lords could be controlled. The king had the undoubted 
right to create any number of peers ; and a majority could, of 
course, be converted into a minority by the process. In the begin- 
ning of September, 1831, Brougham had desired to adopt this 
remedy. His advice had been supported by Durham and Graham, 
who had persistently urged it on their colleagues. The king, how- 
ever, had the strongest possible objection to the suggestion. Grey 
was himself opposed to it ; and Althorp shared Grey's objections 
to any large creation of peers. The reluctance of Grey and 
Althorp to swamp the peerage by a considerable addition to its 
numbers induced the moderate members of the Cabinet to try to 
effect a compromise with a portion of the Opposition. There were 
two sections of the Opposition who, for different reasons, seemed 
capable of conversion. In the first place, the bishops had, almost 
without exception, voted against the former bill, and the king 
thought that his influence might induce them to modify their views. 
In the next place, a few Tory peers, of whom Lord Harrowby and 
Lord Wharncliffe were the most prominent, were profoundly im- 
pressed with the dangers inseparable from the unconditional re- 



The Reform Bill of 1832 561 

jection of the bill, and sincerely anxious to conclude a compromise 
upon it. The negotiations which were attempted with these objects 
were not, however, successful. The king failed to extract a prom- 
ise of support from the bishops, and the demands of the Waverers, 
as the moderate peers were termed, proved inadmissible. These 
failures naturally strengthened the hands of the small party in the 
Cabinet who desired to secure the success of the bill by an un- 
limited creation of peers. . . . 

Brougham declared that the failure of the ministry to make peers t^^ 
was interpreted by the Tories to mean that the king declined to 
create them ; and he suggested that this belief should be removed 
by twelve or fifteen creations, and by the promise of the king to 
sanction further creations if they were necessary. The Cabinet 
assented. The king was induced to give a reluctant consent, on 
the condition that the new peerages should be conferred, with few 
exceptions, on the heirs of existing peers; and he was ultimately 
prevailed upon to withdraw his stipulation that the new creations 
should not exceed twenty-one in number. Rumors of this ar- 
rangement were soon heard. The Waverers, in consequence of 
them, showed an increasing disposition to arrange terms with the 
government. Harrowby and Wharncliffe again distinguished 
themselves by the moderation of their views, and by their desire 
to conclude some compromise acceptable to all parties. Greville, 
whose position at the Council Office had secured him the friend- 
ship of all parties, exerted himself to mediate between them. An 
arrangement was at last concluded by which a majority for the 
second reading of the bill was secured, on condition that no new 
peerages should be created. Harrowby and Wharncliffe were able 
to assure Grey that a sufficient number of votes could be obtained 
for the second reading of the bill on this understanding. 

The bill was introduced in the House of Lords on the 26th of 
March. The Waverers publicly avowed their intention of sup- 
porting it. Wellington formally declared that his own opinion^' 
were unchanged, and the bill was read a first time without divi- 
sion. The debate on the second reading, which commenced on 
the 9th of April, lasted over four nights. The sun had risen on 
the morning of the 14th when the Lords pronounced their decision 
on the principle of the measure. But the division list afforded a 
decisive proof of the change which had been effected in the views 
of the peers. Seventeen peers who had voted against the bill of 
183 1 voted for the bill of 1832. Ten who had voted against the 
bill of 1 83 1 stayed away from the division in 1832; and twelve 
20 



562 English Historians 

others who had been absent in 183 1 supported the measure of 1832. 
These defections from the ranks of the Opposition decided the fate 
of the measure. The bill of 1831 had been lost by a majority of 
forty-one; the second reading of the bill of 1832 was carried by a 
majority of nine. 

The news of the great division was everywhere received with 
satisfaction. Reform had evidently made considerable progress, 
and its ultimate success was becoming more assured. But the 
satisfaction with which the decision of the Lords was regarded 
was not shared by the ministry. The majority by which the second 
reading of the bill had been carried was only small, and no reliance 
could be placed on the future votes of those who had composed it. 
The ministry, in short, could have no chance in carrying the 
measure in its further stages without creating new peers, and the 
peerage question presented unexpected difficulties. The king's 
feelings respecting the Reform Bill had gradually undergone a 
remarkable change. In the beginning of 1831 he had given a 
zealous support to his ministers; and his support was the support 
of a man who thoroughly understood the bill, and whose voice had 
been heard in the arrangement of its details. In March, 1831, he 
had been reluctantly induced to face the possible risks of a dissolu- 
tion and to appeal to the country. But the necessity for a dissolu- 
tion moderated the king's ardor. His zeal cooled in exact pro- 
portion to the growing warmth of the country. . . . The Tory 
papers were induced to declare that the king was pledged to noth- 
ing beyond the second reading of the bill, and that he was entirely 
indifferent as to any alteration which might be made in it in 
committee. 

§ 9. Final Attempt to Block Reform 

These reports, industriously circulated in every quarter, natu- 
rally increased the embarrassment of the ministry. Parliament, 
which had separated for the Easter recess, did not re-assemble till 
the 7th of May. On that evening Lyndhurst moved the post- 
ponement of the clause, disfranchising the boroughs enumerated 
in Schedule A. The motion was carried against the government 
by 151 votes to 116, and Grey at once deferred the further con- 
sideration of the measure. The Cabinet met on the morning of 
the 8th, and decided on "the expediency of advancing to the honor 
of the peerage such a number of persons as might insure the success 
of the bill in all its essential principles." The king was verbally 
assured by Grey and Brougham, who were charged with the duty 



The Reform Bill of 1832 $63 

of laying the decision of the Cabinet before him, that at least fifty 
fresh peerages would be required. The king, after a day's con- 
sideration, declined to act on the advice of his ministers, and ac- 
cepted their resignations. On the same day he sent for Lyndhurst, 
with a view to the formation of a new administration. 

Lyndhurst was sitting in the Court of Exchequer when the king's 
commands for his attendance were brought to him. He found the 
king desirous of carrying a measure of reform, but terrified at the 
extreme counsels of his Whig ministry. Lyndhurst recommended 
him to form an administration prepared to carry a moderate Re- 
form Bill, and undertook himself to conduct a negotiation with this 
object. Charged with the king's commands, Lyndhurst at once 
applied to Wellington. Wellington was more opposed to reform 
than any other statesman. But Wellington's political conduct was 
uniformly governed by two considerations. He always considered 
what was practicable; he always tried to ascertain what was due 
to his sovereign. It was no longer practicable, in 1832, to defend 
the uncompromising position which he had taken in 1830. Reform 
was necessary; and a mild dose, prescribed by the Tories, seemed 
preferable to the strong purge recommended by their opponents. 
Successful with Wellington, Lyndhurst turned to Peel. But Peel 
scornfully rejected the notion that he should personally carry the 
measure which he had spent day and night for a year and a half 
in opposing. Peel's refusal, either to take the highest office or any 
office, was the first rebuff which Lyndhurst received. Peel's 
example was at once imitated by Goulburn and Croker; and these 
successive refusals made the formation of a Tory government hope- 
less. Alexander Baring7 indeed, the member for Callington, a 
gentleman of some experience in commercial pursuits, undertook 
to perform the duties of Chancellor of the Exchequer. Manners 
Sutton, the speaker, promised to lead the House of Commons and 
to be Secretary of State. Experienced politicians, blinded by 
their own prejudices, imagined that a government in a minority 
in the House of Commons — with no first-rate, and even no 
second-rate, men to defend it in that House — had a chance of 
moderating the passionate hurricane which was raging in the 
land. 

The men, however, who reposed in a fancied security amidst the 
strife around them were soon subjected to a rude awakening. On 
the 9th of May, Grey and Althorp announced the resignation of 
the Whig ministry. During a similar crisis in the previous autumn 
Ebrington had come forward and proposed a vote of confidence in 



is 



564 English Historians 

the administration. On the 10th of May, Ebrington again pro- 
posed an address to the crown of confidence in the government. 
The House, on the same evening, adopted the address by a majority 
of eighty. This decision naturally increased the difficulties of the 
Torv gentlemen who were endeavoring to form a new administra- 
tion. They could no longer affect to be ignorant of the opposition 
of the House of Commons. But the decision of the House of 
Commons formed only one element of danger. On the same even- 
ing a petition was presented from the city of London praying the 
House to stop the supplies. On the nth a similar petition was 
presented from Manchester. It was notorious that petitions with 
the same object were being prepared in every large town. Lord 
Milton openly admitted that he had desired the tax-gatherer to call 
again, as he might find it necessary to refuse payment. Men, in 
their passionate excitement, hastily concluded that a commercial 
crisis would be preferable to the fall of the Grey ministry. A run 
upon the Bank of England, it was thought, might increase the 
difficulties of the situation and embarrass the Tory government. 
"Go for gold, and stop the duke," was the advice which was 
placarded on every bare wall in the metropolis. 

Every moment was increasing the difficulties of the duke. On 
Monday, the 14th of May, his difficulties became insuperable. A 
petition was presented to the House of Commons praying that the 
supplies might be refused till the Reform Bill had become a law. 
A violent debate ensued. The duke's inconsistency in accepting 
office was criticised by Duncombe on one side of the House, and 
by Inglis on the other. Every thrust was received with cheers and 
counter-cheers; and the overcrowded House, in a state of uncon- 
trolled excitement, presented a scene of unparalleled violence. 
Baring spoke again and again, but proved unequal to the task of 
moderating the assembly. Appalled at the tempest which they 
had provoked, Sutton and Baring repaired to Wellington to tell 
him that their situation was impracticable. On the following 
morning the duke waited on the king and advised the recall of 
Grey. 

§ 10. Passage of the Bill 

The king had no alternative but to adopt the advice which the 
duke thus gave him. But he still shrank from the expedient, 
which the Whig ministry had pressed on him, of an unlimited 
creation of peers. He suggested to Grey that his old ministers 
might return to office ; that some modifications might be made in 



The Reform Bill of 1832 565 

the bill; and that the measure might then be passed with the 
assistance of the Tory party. Grey replied that the events which 
had taken place had made modifications much more difficult, and 
that ministers could not resume office "except with a sufficient 
security that they will possess the power of passing the present 
bill unimpaired in its principle and its essential provisions, and as f 
nearly as possible in its present form." This security, the ministry 
decided, could only be obtained in two ways. The adversaries 
of the bill might cease from opposing it, or their opposition might 
be overcome. The former alternative appeared impracticable; 
the latter pointed to a large creation of peers. The king, still 
clinging to the hope that an addition to the peerage might be 
avoided, instructed his secretary, Sir Herbert Taylor, to inform 
Wellington that all difficulties would be removed by "a declaration 
in the House of Lords from a sufficient number of peers that they 
have come to the resolution of dropping their further opposition 
to the Reform Bill." Wellington, as usual, obeyed the king's 
commands. He withdrew from the House, and he was accom- 
panied, in withdrawing from it, by Lyndhurst and other peers.U^ 
But the seceders prefaced their withdrawal by speeches of extreme 
violence, and tacitly reserved to themselves the liberty of returning 
and of resuming their opposition to the bill. This conduct in- 
creased the embarrassment of the ministry. The Cabinet, meeting 
the next day, decided that its continuance in office must depend 
on their receiving "full and indisputable security" "for insuring 
the speedy settlement of the Reform Bill." The king, finding that 
he had no alternative but submission, gave the requisite authority. 
The Cabinet was empowered, if it should be necessary to do so, to 
create an unlimited number of peers, provided that the eldest 
sons of peers or the collateral heirs of childless noblemen were 
first summoned to the House of Lords. 

The king's letter had, however, done its work. Wellington and 
other peers, obeying his Majesty's hint, abstained from taking any 
further part in the discussions on the Reform Bill. The Opposi- 
tion was, of course, paralyzed by the abstention of its leaders. 
The measure, freed from any serious attack upon it, made rapid 
progress. It passed through committee at the end of May; it 
was read a third time on the 4th of June. The House of Com- 
mons immediately afterwards assented to the slight amendments 
which had been introduced in the Lords; and on the 7th of June 
the royal assent to the measure was given by commission. 



CHAPTER- III 

THE TRIUMPH OF URBAN DEMOCRACY 

The Reform Bill of 1832 did little to meet the demands of the 
working classes for the right to vote, and more than thirty years 
were to elapse before their claim to the franchise was conceded by 
Parliament. Their violent agitations during the Chartist move- 
ment were without avail, but some years later the rivalry of the 
great political parties seeking popular support led to the first 
measure which granted political power to an appreciable portion 
of the propertyless classes. When Earl Russell became prime 
minister in 1865, the signal for a new conflict over democracy was 
given. 

§ 1 . The Political Situation and the New Reform Bill 1 

That the government of Lord Russell would introduce a Reform 
Bill was considered on all hands as a matter of course. The only 
questions in dispute were when the bill would be brought in, and 
whether it would be a big bill or a small one. Even if Lord Russell 
and Mr. Gladstone had not both been ardent Reformers, they 
could hardly dispense with the support of the Radicals, and that 
support, as Mr. Bright told them in a speech at Rochdale, where 
he lived, would depend upon their earnestness in the enfranchise- 
ment of the people. All through the north of England public 
feeling was vehemently excited, and numerous meetings were held 
with great enthusiasm. In the south, on the other hand, compara- 
tive apathy prevailed, and there were men in the Cabinet, such as 
Lord Clarendon and the Duke of Somerset, who liked reform as 
little as their departed chief. The regular Opposition represented 
by Lord Derby and Mr. Disraeli, were committed to the principle 

1 Paul, A History of Modern England, Vol. Ill, pp. 22 ff. By per- 
mission of The Macmillan Company, Publishers. 

'566 



The Triumph of Urban Democracy 567 

of reform, having in 1859 introduced a Reform Bill themselves. 
But they were, of course, entitled to treat any particular scheme 
upon its merits, and to accept it or reject it accordingly. 

The mention of the subject in the Queen's Speech was unusual 
and ambiguous. . . . But ministers were better than their words, 
and on the 12th of March, the month of reform bills, Mr. Glad- 
stone disclosed the scheme. It proved to be mild and moderate 
indeed, milder and more moderate than even the bill of i860. 
The county franchise would be reduced from a rental of fifty pounds 
to a rental of fourteen, and the borough franchise from a rental of 
ten pounds to a rental of seven. Compound householders, for 
whom their landlords "compounded," paying their rates and 
charging the payment in the rent, were to be on the same footing 
with other householders, and there would be a lodger franchise 
for every man whose lodgings were worth ten pounds a year un- 
furnished. There would also be a right of voting conferred by 
the deposit of fifty pounds in a savings bank for two years, and, 
on the other hand, laborers in the dockyards of the government 
would be disfranchised. It was estimated that the number of 
electors added to the constituencies by the bill would be four 
hundred thousand. That this measure should have been, as it 
was, accepted with gratitude by the Radicals, is strange,, 

§ 2. Opposition to Mr. Gladstone's Measure 

That it should have roused vehement and bitter animosity 
would be still stranger, if the approval of Mr. Bright and Mr. 
Mill did not to some extent account for the opposition of Mr. 
Horsman and Mr. Lowe. That opposition was declared at once. 
There was no division upon the first reading of the bill. But it 
was debated for three nights, and on the second evening Mr. Lowe 
made a powerful attack upon it, which was received with enthu- 
siastic applause by the Conservative party. Mr. Gladstone had 
not thought it necessary to argue in favor of reform, inasmuch as 
five administrations in six Queen's Speeches had pledged them- 
selves to a reduction of the franchise. Mr. Lowe fastened upon 
this omission, and baldly declared that the House of Commons 
was as good as it could be. Not since the Duke of Wellington's 
celebrated protest in 1830 against touching the ideal symmetry 
of the British Constitution had there been heard in Parliament 
a more emphatic outburst of undiluted Toryism. Forgetting 
altogether that he had supported as a member of the government, 



568 English Historians 

though not of the Cabinet, the Reform Bill of i860, he declared that 
he did not envy Mr. Gladstone the glory of carrying such legislation. 
He coveted rather the fame of resisting it to the utmost of his power. 
In words of which he was not soon to hear the last, he said, " You 
have had the opportunity of knowing some of the constituencies of 
this country, and I ask, if you want venality, ignorance, drunken- 
ness, and the means of intimidation, if you want impulsive, unre- 
flecting, and violent people, where will you go to look for them, to 
the top or the bottom?" Mr. Lowe always denied that he used 
this language of the working classes as a whole. The context, 
he said, showed that he spoke of those already enfranchised. 
This was true, but it was a quibble. For in the first place, Mr. 
Lowe maintained, contrary to the evidence, that the best of the 
working classes were enfranchised already, and, in the second 
place, his illustration had no meaning unless it expressed the 
danger of a suffrage which admitted them in larger numbers. 
Mr. Lowe had not been fortunate in his experience of the populace 
at Kidderminster, where his life was imperilled by the violence 
of the mob. He now represented nominally the people of Calne, 
and really the Marquess of Lansdowne. . . . 

§ 3. The Adullamites and Conservatives 

Next to the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the member for 
Calne the most prominent speaker was Mr. Bright. In his hap- 
piest vein, and with his raciest humor, he compared the party of 
Mr. Lowe and Mr. Horsman with the Scotch terrier, so covered by 
hair that you could not tell which was the head and which was the 
tail. In the same speech, his speech on the first reading, he made 
use of a political metaphor which has not been staled by age or 
withered by custom. He compared Mr. Horsman, a showy, 
shallow person, very prominent at the time, with the Hebrew chief 
who gathered round him in the cave of Adullam every one that 
was in distress, and every one that was discontented. The Whig 
malcontents were at once christened Adullamites, and a group of 
rebellious politicians have ever since been known as a cave. 

The Conservative party had immediately to decide whether they 
would join forces with Mr. Lowe and the rest of the Adullamites. 
They were not long in making up their minds. On the 16th of 
March they held a meeting at Lord Salisbury's house, with Lord 
Derby in the chair, and determined to oppose the bill. Four days 
afterwards, before the House of Commons adjourned for the 



The Triumph of Urban Democracy 569 

Easter recess, Lord Grosvenor gave notice of an amendment to 
the second reading, which objected to further progress with an in- 
complete scheme, and, to show the unity of the opposition on both 
sides of the House, it was announced that the amendment would 
be seconded by Lord Stanley. In other words, the Conservatives 
and Adullamites, instead of meeting the proposals of the govern- 
ment with a direct .negative, fixed upon the plausible point that 
reduction of the franchise should be accompanied by redistribu- 
tion of seats. . . . 

§ 4. The Debate between Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Lowe 

Thus, when, on the 12th of April, the debate upon the second 
reading of the bill began, the omens were not favorable to the^/ 
government, and Mr. Gladstone found it desirable to meet the 
Opposition halfway. He undertook that before going into com- 
mittee the House should be made acquainted with the whole scheme 
of reform, including the Redistribution Bill and the bills for Scot- 
land and Ireland. But to Lord Grosvenor's amendment, which 
called for this disclosure before the second reading, ministers still 
objected, and upon that narrow issue the trial of strength was nomi- 
nally held. The real subject of discussion was, however, the bill 
itself, and the real speakers were two. There was nothing to 
prevent the opponents of the measure from continuing the debate 
as long as they pleased, and they were pleased to continue it for 
eight nights. Lord Grosvenor was merely an ornamental figure- 
head. His seconder, Lord Stanley, intellectually the ablest mem- 
ber of the Conservative party, stuck to his text, and dwelt upon the 
risk that accident might assign the privilege of dealing with re- 
distribution to a new and more democratic Parliament. The 
eloquence of Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton was always ready to flow 
with equal vehemence and volume on either side of reform. Sir 
Hugh Cairns, almost alone among his contemporaries, spoke with 
the same effect as a statesman and as a lawyer. Mr. Disraeli, 
wary and adroit, used the Adullamites without allowing them to 
use him, and attacked the bill while he kept his own opinions to 
himself. 

But the waves of time have long since obliterated all traces of this 
verbal conflict, except the memorable duel between Mr. Gladstone 
and Mr. Lowe. Without Lowe the cave would have been contemp- 
tible, and the Conservatives would have allowed the second read- 
ing to pass unchallenged. He was the brains and heart of the 



570 English Historians 

Opposition. Gladstone had the advantage of being able to make 
two speeches, whereas Lowe could make only one. But in his 
first speech the minister was scrupulously mild, and did not go 
beyond entreating the House of Commons to be "wise in time." 
The "combination of Lowe and Disraeli was required to draw from 
him the most magnificent specimen of Parliamentary eloquence 
which the oldest member of Parliament could recollect. In 
Lowe's eyes the bill was the first step on the downward path to 
that democracy which, more than anything else, he dreaded and 
loathed. He held up as a warning the dangerous power of Trade 
Unions, and showed, in language which must have given some 
ground for reflection to Mill, how unsound was the democratic 
finance of the self-governing colonies. "Look at free trade," 
he cried. "If we have a precious jewel in the world, it is our free- 
trade policy. It has been everything to us. With what eyes do 
democracies look at it? . . . Canada has raised her duties 
enormously, and justified them upon protectionist principles. The 
Prime Minister of New South Wales at this moment is a strong 
protectionist. The ministry in Victoria were free traders, but by 
the will of the people they have become converted, and have 
become protectionists." After making the singularly unfortunate 
prediction that responsible government in France could not coexist 
with universal suffrage, he concluded, amid the enthusiastic ap- 
plause of the party opposite to which he sat, "Surely the heroic 
work of so many centuries, the matchless achievements of so many 
wise heads and strong hands, deserve a nobler consummation than 
to be sacrificed at the shrine of revolutionary passion or maudlin 
enthusiasm of humanity. Uncoerced by any external force, not 
borne down by any internal calamity, but in the full plethora of 
our wealth and the surfeit of our too exuberant prosperity, with 
our own rash and inconsiderate hands we are about to pluck down 
on our own heads the venerable temple of our liberty and our 
glory. History may tell of other acts as signally disastrous, but 
of none more wanton, none more disgraceful." 

This powerful, if somewhat extravagant, harangue was deliv- 
ered on the 26th of April. WTien at one o'clock in the morning of 
the 28th the Chancellor of the Exchequer rose to reply, a crowded 
House, eager for the division and not unmindful of repose, was 
spellbound for two hours by the magic of his words as he reviewed 
with consummate dexterity the whole course of the debate. Al- 
though he followed Disraeli, his real antagonist was Lowe. "At 
last, sir/' he began, in an abrupt and vigorous exordium, "we 



The Triumph of Urban Democracy 571 

have obtained a clear declaration from an authoritative source, 
and we now know that a bill which in a country with some five 
millions of adult males proposes to add to the present limited con- 
stituency two hundred thousand of the middle class, and two 
hundred thousand of the working class, is, in the judgment of 
the leader of the Tory party, a bill to reconstruct the Constitution on 
American principles." Mr. Disraeli, with unusual want of tact and 
sense, had taunted him with having opposed the Reform Bill of 183 1 
in the Oxford Union. This rather absurd gibe gave the orator an 
opportunity of explaining his political growth. "I was bred," 
he told the House, "under the shadow of the great name of Can- 
ning ; every influence connected with that name governed the first 
political impressions of my childhood and my youth; following Mr. 
Canning, I rejoiced in the removal of religious disabilities from the 
Roman Catholic body, and in the free and truly British tone 
which he gave to our policy abroad; following Mr. Canning, I 
rejoiced in the opening he boldly and wisely gave towards the 
establishment of free commercial exchanges between nations ; with 
Mr. Canning, and under the attraction of that great name, and 
under the influence likewise of the yet more venerable name of 
Burke, I own that my youthful mind and imagination were im- 
pressed with those same idle and futile fears which still bewilder 
and distract the mature mind of the right honorable gentleman." 
But he speedily left the leader of the Opposition and came to his 
leading opponent. With Lowe's academic denunciations of the 
working classes he contrasted their heroic endurance of the cotton 
famine in Lancashire. Coming to close quarters with Lowe's so- 
called dilemma, Gladstone denied that it was a dilemma at all. He 
answered the question whether he thought the franchise was a 
good thing in itself, or whether he wished to improve the insti- 
tutions of the country, with a double affirmative. It was a good 
thing, and, because it was a good thing, it would make other things 
better. The working classes were worthy of enfranchisement, 
and therefore the Cabinet proposed to enfranchise them. Why 
should that reasonable proposal be resisted by a great party? 
What had the Conservatives gained by opposing Catholic Eman- 
cipation, the first Reform Bill, the repeal of the Corn Laws? All 
these measures had been carried in spite of them, and since 1832 the 
Whigs or Liberals had been in power for at least five years out of 
six. Then, raising his tone, Mr. Gladstone was bold enough to 
prophesy that, as the cause was above the men, those who fought 
against it were fighting against the future. "Time is on our side. 



572 English Historians 

The great social forces which move onwards in their might and 
majesty, and which the tumult of these debates does not for a 
moment impede or disturb, those great social forces are against 
you ; they work with us, they are marshalled in our support. And 
the banner which we now carry in the fight, though perhaps at 
some moment of the struggle it may droop over our sinking heads, 
yet will float again in the eye of heaven, and will be borne by the 
firm hands of the united people of the three kingdoms, perhaps not 
to an easy, but to a certain and to a not distant, victory." 

To the sound of this magnificent peroration the House divided. 
Never had it been more excited. Never had it been so crowded. 
Six hundred and thirty-one members being present, the govern- 
ment were saved from defeat by five votes alone. No wonder the 
Conservatives cheered themselves hoarse. No wonder Mr. Lowe 
and other denizens of the cave stood up and waved their hats in 
triumph over the heads of the colleagues they had deserted. For 
although, after the rejection of the amendment, the bill was allowed 
to be read a second time in silence, it had received a mortal blow, 
and the official lives of the ministers who introduced it were not 
worth a quarter's salary. 

§ 5. Renewal of the Conflict under Lord Derby and Mr. Disraeli 

[The practical defeat of the Russell ministry led to its resignation, 
and though in a minority the Conservatives were called to power 
under the leadership of Lord Derby- Mr. Disraeli, as Chancellor 
of the Exchequer, and leader in the House of Commons, was not 
long in discovering that reform was inevitable. He was doubly 
convinced of this by some mild rioting which occurred in Hyde 
Park and by the extensive agitations of the Radicals throughout 
the country.] 

The Conservative leader, or rather the leader of the Conserva- 
tives, in the House of Commons, was a man of dauntless courage 
and unlimited resource. In language slightly reminiscent of Mrs. 
Micawber, he declared that he would not desert Lord Derby, and 
that he would introduce the original bill on the 18th of March. 

O 

Three days before that date Lord Derby held a meeting of his 
party, and announced that the bill would provide for household 
suffrage in boroughs, subject to the essential conditions of two 
years' residence and the personal payment of rates. There would 



The Triumph of Urban Democracy 573 

also be educational, professional, and property franchises with the 
dual vote. The county franchise would be reduced from a rental 
qualification of fifty pounds to a rating qualification of fifteen. If 
this bill were rejected, the government would dissolve. These 
last words were the most effective in Lord Derby's speech, and it 
is not difficult to guess who prompted them. A penal dissolution 
has always been regarded as a legitimate weapon for a minister in 
an emergency to use. But it means, of course, that every member 
who votes against the government will subject himself, if he suc- 
ceeds, to a fine of some hundred pounds. The immediate effect 
of the speech was almost everything that the Prime Minister could 
desire. 

Mr. Henley who had resigned rather than assent to the Reform 
Bill of 1859, and was not a member of the present government, 
signified his hearty approval of household suffrage with payment 
of rates, and the only voice of disapproval at the meeting came from 
Sir William Heathcote, a model squire and churchman, but not an 
influential politician. When the bill was introduced it was found 
to correspond closely enough with Lorb Derby's sketch. The 
fancy franchises, however, lent themselves to ridicule. The pay- 
ment of one pound a year in direct taxes (not being licenses, so as to 
exclude Mr. Bright's "rat-catcher with two dogs") was to give a 
vote, and to a householder, two. Fifty pounds in the funds or in 
a savings bank, and membership of the learned professions, would 
also confer the right of voting. It is strange and almost incredible, 
but there seems, no doubt, that Mr. Gladstone contemplated a 
course so unwise as opposition to the whole bill. But a meeting 
of the party at his own house convinced him that this could not be 
done, and he contented himself with an exhaustive criticism of its 
principal provisions. . . . He gave notice of a whole series of 
amendments, and on the nth of April he moved the first which 
would have enfranchised every householder, whether himself or 
his landlord were personally rated to the relief of the poor. In 
other words, the compound householder was to have a vote. But 
Mr. Gladstone fatally weakened his position with his Radical 
followers by proposing in a subsequent amendment to exclude 
all householders whose premises were rated below five pounds. 
This point, however, was not raised. 

§ 6. The Debate on an Amendment 

The debate on the first amendment lasted for two nights and was 
most animated in tone. Mr. Gathorne Hardy defended the bill 



574 English Historians 

with the impetuous eagerness which distinguished him, and Mr. 
Beresford Hope, a disaffected follower of the government, an- 
nounced, with the awkward facetiousness which mistakes itself 
for humor, that he should vote against the " Asian mystery." Mr. 
Disraeli's retort was one of the happiest to be found in Hansard. 
"I can assure the honorable gentleman," he said, "that I listened 
with great pleasure to the invectives he delivered against me. I 
admire his style; it is a very great ornament to discussion, but it 
requires practice. I listen with the greatest satisfaction to all his 
exhibitions in this House, and when he talks about an Asian mystery 
I will tell him that there are Batavian graces in all that he says 
which I notice with satisfaction, and which charm me." The 
division showed a majority of twenty-one for the government, 
and the House adjourned for the Easter recess. 

Mr. Disraeli's triumph was signal, not the less so because of the 
discomfiture inflicted on his great adversary. The blow to Mr. 
Gladstone's authority was serious, and nobody perceived the fact 
more clearly than Mr. Gladstone himself. He contemplated 
resigning the lead of the party, and, in reply to his faithful supporter, 
Mr. Crawford, announced that he should move no more amend- 
ments to the bill. It seems to have been at this time, if at all, that 
Mr. Disraeli said he would "hold Gladstone down for twenty 
years." Twenty minutes would have been nearer the mark; for 
now the tide began to turn. During the Easter holidays the coun- 
try had the opportunity of hearing what the idol of advanced 
Reformers thought of Mr. Gladstone. "Who is there in the 
House of Commons," asked Mr. Bright at Birmingham, "who 
equals him in knowledge of all political questions? Who equals 
him in earnestness ? Who equals him in eloquence ? Who equals 
him in courage, and fidelity to his convictions ? If these gentlemen 
who say they will not follow him have any one who is equal, let 
them show him. If they can point out any statesman who can add 
dignity and grandeur to the stature of Mr. Gladstone, let them 
produce him." At this meeting, and at many others held in the 
Easter recess, the removal of all restrictions upon household suf- 
frage, and a franchise for lodgers, were demanded. 

The Reformers had not long to wait. . Consideration of the bill 
in committee was resumed on the 2nd of May, and Mr. Ayrton's 
amendment reducing the period of qualification from two years to 
one was carried against the government by eighty-one votes. 
The government yielded without discredit to the decision of the 
committee. But another instance of submission was not equally 






The Triumph of Urban Democracy 575 

fortunate. The Reform League having summoned a meeting in 
Hyde Park for the 6th of May, Mr. Walpole issued a notice 
signed with his own name to warn all persons against attending it. 
The League replied by urging all persons to attend it, and Lord 
Derby announced that as it was perfectly legal nothing would be 
done to prevent it. It was accordingly held in great numbers and 
perfect order. Although there were at least two hundred thousand 
people in the park, not a plant was disturbed, nor the leaf of a 
flower touched. Colonel Dickson rather happily addressed the 
crowd as "My friends and fellow-trespassers." But satisfactory 
as the result was from Colonel Dickson's point of view, the position 
of Mr. Walpole, a man too good for this world, had become in- 
tolerable. He resigned the Home Office, and was succeeded by 
Mr. Gathorne Hardy. Events outside strengthened the Liberal 
party in the House of Commons, and Mr. Gladstone, receiving a 
deputation to express confidence in him as a leader, denounced 
the "absurd, preposterous, and mischievous distinctions of per- 
sonal rating." Mr. Disraeli was, or professed to be, much shocked 
by this language. But he soon had more important matters to 
occupy his mind. Liberals were coming together again, and were 
showing a disposition to follow the advice of a sturdy democrat, 
who remarked that as Disraeli was bent on manipulating democ- 
racy, they should take his democracy, and treat his manipula- 
tion as the wicked would be treated at the Day of Judgment. 

§ 7. A Radical Amendment 

Mr. McCullagh Torrens, the biographer of Sir James Graham 
and Lord Melbourne, proposed the enfranchisement of lodgers 
and to this the government agreed, only stipulating that the lodg- 
ings must be worth, unfurnished, ten pounds a year, or about 
four shillings a week. A still more important change followed. 
Mr. Hodgkinson, Liberal member for Newark, a local solicitor 
little known in the House, moved "that no person other than the 
occupier shall be assessed to parochial rates within the limits of a 
Parliamentary borough.". . . So little did Mr. Hodgkinson dream 
of success that he estimated the probable majority against him at 
about a hundred. To the surprise of every one, and the consterna- 
tion of his own followers, Mr. Disraeli at once accepted the amend- 
ment, which was added, without a division to the bill. Mr. 
Gladstone has left it on record that no episode in the romantic 
career of the "mystery man" astonished him more than this, 



\ 



576 English Historians 

adding that Mr. Disraeli made up his mind before he had con- 
sulted the Cabinet, who were afterwards summoned to hear from 
an eminent statistician, Mr. Lambert, the numerical effect of the 
change. Thus, of Lord Derby's two main safeguards, a two 
years' residence and personal rating, one had already gone, and the 
other had become a farce ; for although every borough voter would 
be personally rated, so would every resident in a borough, which 
was household suffrage, pure and simple, without restriction or 
modification. The compound householder ceased, from a Par- 
liamentary point of view, to exist, and a silence, only to be broken 
by the historian, fell upon the burning question of lobby gossip 
and dinner-table talk. Well might Bernal Osborne declare that 
the Chancellor of the Exchequer was the greatest Radical in the 
House. The fury of Mr. Lowe almost exceeded his very con- 
siderable powers of speech. He implored the gentlemen of Eng- 
land, "with their ancestry behind them, and their posterity before 
them," — a natural position which they shared even with compound 
householders, — to "save the Constitution from the hands of a mul- 
titude struggling with want and discontent." 

What was to become of the House of Lords ? The country and 
the Conservative party were alike ruined. Sir Rainald Knightley, 
who had helped to destroy the far milder Reform Bill of the previous 
year, complained bitterly of desertion. But Mr. Disraeli remained 
passive and imperturbable, satisfied that, in Lord Derby's phrase, 
he had "dished the Whigs" with a vengeance. Then the pace 
became fast and furious. Mr. Mill's proposal for woman's 
franchise was dismissed with the dreary jocularity considered 
suitable to such occasions. Mill's speech in moving his amend- 
ment is the ablest and clearest statement of the case for the political 
enfranchisement of women. Much of it was too high-flown and 
romantic for the House of Commons. But the purely Parlia- 
mentary arguments are very strong. All other barriers to the suf- 
frage, said Mill, could be surmounted by obtaining the requisite 
qualification. This alone could not. An unrepresented woman 
might pay twice as much in taxation as a represented man. If 
politics were "not a woman's business," neither were they a man's, 
unless he happened to be a member of Parliament. If "indirect 
influence" were equivalent to representation, rich men ought to 
be disfranchised on account of their wealth. Power without 
responsibility was the most mischievous kind of power. The 
closing of professions to women, and the absolute right of husbands 
to take their wives' property unless it was protected by settlement, 



The Triumph of Urban Democracy 577 

were grievances which would not be redressed until women had 
votes. 

Prophecy is always dangerous, and this one has not been more 
fortunate than others. But that such arguments should not have 
been deemed worthy of a serious reply is discreditable to the 
House of Commons, and especially to its leaders. Neither of 
them took part in the debate. Gladstone voted against the amend- 
ment. Disraeli did not vote at all. The copyhold franchise fixed 
by the government at ten pounds was next reduced to five, and the 
occupation franchise in counties was brought down from fifteen 
pounds to twelve. The educational franchise was abandoned, 
despite the protest of Mr. Fawcett, who clung to the belief that 
education would make every one a Liberal. The property 
franchise followed, and the dual vote, which Mr. Gladstone had 
always opposed, died without an epitaph or a tear. The same fate 
befell Mr. Mill's scheme, or rather Mr. Hare's, of enabling electors 
to vote for "members of Parliament in general" if they disliked 
their own candidates, which almost justified Mr. Bright's ob- 
jurgatory remark about great thinkers, "The worst of them is 
that they so often think wrong." On this occasion also Mill 
addressed the committee with great ability, and Lord Cranborne 
administered a dignified rebuke to his fellow-members for the in- 
difference with which they had received such a speech from such 
a man. Outside the sphere of religion there were not many things 
which Lord Cranborne respected. But intellectual eminence was 
one of them. 

§ 8. Redistribution of Seats 

The disfranchisement of three boroughs for bribery led to the 
subject of redistribution and to another defeat of the government. 
The bill would have left Cockermouth with a population of seven 
thousand, to return the same number of members as Liverpool, 
with a population of nearly half a million. As a small step towards 
electoral justice, Mr. Laing carried an amendment to deprive of 
one member all boroughs with a population of less than ten thou- 
sand. Mr. Laing's victory led, after the Whitsuntide recess, to a 
considerable change in the redistributing clauses of the bill. 
Even in their new form they were absurdly inadequate. But 
still they were an appreciable though a very short step toward a 
system of numerical representation. London received four new 
members for the two new boroughs of Hackney and Chelsea. 
After several debates at a later stage, in the course of which Gen- 

2P 




578 English Historians 

eral Peel observed that nothing had so little vitality as a vital point, 
that nothing was so insecure as a security, and that nothing was 
so elastic as the conscience of a Cabinet minister, a third member 
was given to Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, and Leeds. 
Salford and Merthyr received a second. The new boroughs created, 
nine in number, were Hartlepool, Darlington, Middlesbrough, 
Burnley, Dewsbury, Stalybridge, Wednesbury, Gravesend, and 
Stockton. The University of London was made for the first time 
a constituency, with a single representative. Twenty-five seats 
were bestowed on the counties; South Lancashire, for which Mr. 
Gladstone sat, being further divided into Southeast and Southwest. 
The new seats were obtained, not by increasing the numbers of 
the House, but by the partial disfranchisement of small, doubly 
represented towns. The use of voting-papers, the last remaining 
barrier against a turbulent populace and the luxury of the elderly, 
the indolent, the distant, the infirm, was expunged from the bill 
on the 20th of June by a majority of thirty-eight, and thus the Lib- 
eral party were victorious all along the line. 

Everything for which Mr. Gladstone asked had been extorted 
or conceded. The lodger had been enfranchised in the precise 
form recommended by Mr. Bright seventeen years before; the 
compound householder was no more ; the property franchise had 
followed the dual vote into oblivion ; voting-papers had gone after 
them; the educational suffrage had been rejected with scorn. No 
wonder that on the third reading the honest opponents of reform, 
few as they were, spoke their minds without reserve. Lord Cran- 
borne, who had already described the monarchical principle as 
dead, the aristocratic principle as doomed, and the democratic 
principle as triumphant, now denounced "a political betrayal 
which had no parallel in our annals, and which had struck at the 
roots of that Parliamentary confidence upon which alone the 
strength of our representative system was maintained." Mr. 
Lowe declared that England had "gained a shameful victory over 
herself," and referred to "the shame, the rage, the scorn, the in- 
dignation, and the despair with which the measure was viewed by 
every Englishman who was not a slave to the trammels of party or 
dazzled by the glare of a temporary and ignoble success." Mr. 
Lowe's practical moral that we must compel our future masters 
to learn their letters was very much to the point, and a good deal 
more valuable than his highly artificial invective. 

Mr. Bright's patronizing approval must have been less to Mr. 
Disraeli's taste than the attacks of Lord Cranborne and Mr. Lowe. 



The Triumph of Urban Democracy 579 

But in truth he cared very little for either the one or the other. 
For him the supreme test of human affairs was success, and if he 
succeeded he attributed hostile criticism to the pique engendered 
by failure. It was not his bill, but it had passed, and he, not his 
adversaries, sat upon the Treasury Bench. "Sing, riding's a joy ! 
For me, I ride." They had their rhapsodies of conscious virtue. 
He led the House of Commons. Nor can the severest judge of his 
singular and cryptic character deny that there is something more 
wholesome than Mr. Lowe's splenetic outburst in the spirited sen- 
tences with which Mr. Disraeli concluded his aggressive apology, 
"I think England is safe in the race of men who inhabit her; that 
she is safe in something much more precious than her accumulated 
capital, her accumulated experience; she is safe in her national 
character, in her fame, in the tradition of a thousand years, and in 
that glorious future which I believe awaits her." 

§ 9. The Bill in the House of Lords 

Next day the bill was brought to the bar of the House of Lords, 
and the second reading was fixed for the 22nd of July. Those 
who study the British Constitution in books of authority learn that 
Parliament consists, besides the sovereign, of two houses, one he- 
reditary and the other elective. The elective House, dependent 
upon the constituencies, is penetrated with the spirit of party, 
amenable to whips and wirepullers, swayed from one side to 
another by the breath of the popular will. The hereditary House, 
on the other hand, is entirely removed from the influence of 
political connection, and judges public issues entirely on their 
merits. Having no electors to please, and being placed above 
vulgar inducements by the fortunate accident of birth, the peers 
can afford to sink every consideration except that of regard for \f 
their country's welfare, of which the responsibilities involved in 
their lofty eminence forbid them to lose sight. Not being told 
(for it has nothing to do with the theory of the Constitution) that 
the Lords, like the Commons, are divided into parties, with their 
respective leaders and whips, the student would conclude that 
this illustrious assembly paid no heed to the frivolous question 
whether a bill had been introduced by a Liberal or a Conservative 
ministry. What, then, according to the doctors of the law, would 
have been the duty of the Upper House in July, 1867 ? 

A bill was laid before them at the close of the session involving . 
large and hazardous alterations of the political system which had ^ 



V 



580 English Historians 

been in vogue for five-and-thirty years. It had never been sub- 
mitted to the judgment of the country, unless the country was 
represented by the Reform League. It had been turned upside down 
in committee, and was much wider in its scope than a bill which 
the same House of Commons had refused to pass the year before. 
That bill would at the most have added half a million electors to 
the constituent bodies. This bill would add at least a million, 
most of them uneducated, and some of them the poorest of the poor. 
There could hardly be a stronger case for the suspensory action 
supposed to be exercised by a Chamber of Review. This very 
session the Lords rejected bills for the abolition of church rates, 
and for the removal of religious tests in the universities, which 
had been repeatedly passed by the Commons. What happened ? 
The leader of a great party, the prime minister of England, sum- 
moned what in America was called a caucus. Before the debate 
on the second reading he assembled at his own house a hundred 
Conservative peers, and told them that he wished the bill to pass 
with the fewest possible amendments in the shortest possible time. 
He intimated, nor obscurely, that if it failed to pass, he should 
resign. He had threatened in the event of its rejection by the 
Commons to dissolve. But a dissolution has no terrors for the 
peers, whereas they dreaded a Liberal, perhaps a Radical, gov- 
ernment as the worst of calamities. 

Accordingly, after two nights' debate, the bill was read a second 
time without a division. The speeches were not remarkable, but 
Lord Derby heard a good deal of plain speaking from Lord Car- 
narvon, who proclaimed and lamented, in language borrowed 
from Disraeli's attack upon Peel, that conservatism was an or- 
ganized hypocrisy. The prime minister, with his accustomed 
frankness, explained that he did not intend for a third time to be 
made a mere stop-gap until it should suit the convenience of the 
Liberal party to forget their dissensions, and bring forward a 
measure which should oust him from office and place them there. 
Lord Shaftesbury delivered the ablest attack upon the bill, and 
Lord Cairns the ablest defence of it. But a discussion which is 
not to be followed by a trial of strength in the lobbies has seldom 
much life in it, and this was no exception to the rule. Some im- 
portant changes were made in the committee. But as only one 
of them was accepted by the House of Commons and became law, 
it is needless to recapitulate the others. Lord Cairns, taking up a 
suggestion made by Lord Russell, proposed that in constituencies 
returning three members no one should vote for more than two 



The Triumph of Urban Democracy 581 

candidates, nor in the city of London, which returned four mem- 
bers, for more than three. This idea of representing minorities 
was less objectionable than the cumulative vote which Mr. Lowe 
had vainly proposed in the House of Commons. Although Bright, 
Gladstone, and Disraeli united in disapproving of it, it was accepted 
for the sake of agreement between the houses, and became law, 
perhaps the single instance of a political innovation made by a 
judge. 

Lord Derby's final speech on the motion that "this bill do pass" 
contained his frank and famous acknowledgment that he was 
"taking a leap in the dark." His next words, however, were an 
expression of confidence in the sound sense of his fellow-country- 
men, and ignorance of the future is not the charge against the 
government of 1867. The act was, on the whole, useful and bene- 
ficial. The county franchise was indeed merely tinkered, and the 
scheme of redistribution little better than a sham. But the bor- 
ough franchise, both for householders and for lodgers, was placed 
upon a firm and solid foundation which has stood the test of time. 
If the characters of public men were of no public importance, this 
would be a conclusive defence for Lord Derby and Mr. Disraeli. 
But it was impossible for them to deny either that in 1866 they 
opposed and destroyed a Reform Bill much more Conservative 
than their own, or that in 1867 they abandoned safeguard after 
safeguard which they had pronounced essential to the welfare 
of the State. 

Bibliographical Note 

Walpole, The History of Twenty-five Years, Vol. II. Morley, Life of 
Gladstone, Vol. II, Book V, chaps, xiii and xiv. Barnett Smith, Life and 
Letters of John Bright. Lives of Disraeli, Earl of Bcaconsfield, by Gorst, 
Froude, Sichel, and O'Connor. Dickinson, The Development of Parliament 
during the Nineteenth Century. 



Chapter iv 

THE ENFRANCHISEMENT OF THE RURAL LABORER 

The general election of 1880 gave the Liberals a large majority 
over both Conservatives and Home Rulers. In the Cabinet or- 
ganized by Mr. Gladstone there were three distinguished Radicals, 
Mr. Bright, Mr. Chamberlain, and Sir Charles Dilke; but three 
years passed before an attempt was made to force a further exten- 
sion of the franchise. After several disturbing events such as the 
troubles in Ireland, Egypt, and South Africa, the strength of the 
government's support throughout the country was sensibly dimin- 
ished. Partly from principle and partly from a political design to 
complete the ruin of the Conservatives, the ministry decided to 
enfranchise the agricultural laborers and thus retain the confidence 
of all Radicals and get the support of the new voters. In his work 
on Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Morley gives a full account of the last of the 
great political reforms. 

§ 1. Parliamentary Representation after 1867 — $ ie New Measure 1 

The question of extending to householders in the country the 
franchise that in 1867 had been conferred on householders in 
boroughs, had been first pressed with eloquence and resolution by 
Mr. Trevelyan. In 1876 he introduced two resolutions, one for 
extended "franchise, the other for a new arrangement of seats, 
made necessary by the creation of the new voters. In a Tory 
Parliament he had, of course, no chance. Mr. Gladstone, not 
naturally any more ardent for change in political machinery than 
Burke or Canning had been, was in no hurry about it, but was well 
aware that the triumphant Parliament of 1880 could not be al- 
lowed to expire without the effective adoption by the government 

1 Morley, Life of Gladstone, Vol. Ill, pp. 124 ff. By permission of The 
Macmillan Company, Publishers. 

58a 






The Enfranchisement of the Rural Laborer 583 

of proposals in principle such as those made by Mr. Trevelyan 
in 1876. One wing of the Cabinet hung back. Mr. Gladstone 
himself, reading the signs in the political skies, felt that the hour 
had struck ; the Cabinet followed, and the bill was framed. Never, 
said Mr. Gladstone, was a bill so large in respect of the numbers 
to have votes, so innocent in point of principle, for it raised no new 
questions and sprang from no new principles. It went, he con- 
tended, and most truly contended, to the extreme of considera- 
tion for opponents, and avoided several points that had special 
attractions for friends. So likewise the general principles on 
which redistribution of seats would be governed were admittedly 
framed in a conservative spirit. 

The comparative magnitude of the operation was thus described 
by Mr. Gladstone (February 28, 1884): — 

" In 1832 there was passed what was considered a Magna Charta ^ 
of British liberties; but that Magna Charta of British liberties 
added, according to the previous estimate of Lord John Russell, 
500,000, while according to the results considerably less than 
500,000 were added to the entire constituency of the three coun- 
tries. After 1832 we come to 1866. At that time the total con- 
stituency of the United Kingdom reached 1,364,000. By the bills 
which were passed between 1867 and 1869 that number was raised 
to 2,448,000. Under the action of the present law the constitu- 
ency has reached in round numbers what I would call 3,000,000. 
This bill, if it passes as presented, will add to the English 
constituency over 1,300,000 persons. It will add to the Scotch 
constituency, Scotland being at present rather better provided in 
this respect than either of the other countries, over 200,000, and 
to the Irish constituency over 400,000; or in the main, to the 
present aggregate constituency of the United Kingdom taken at 
3,000,000, it will add 2,000,000 more, nearly twice as much as was 
added since 1867, an< ^ m ore than four times as much as was added 
in 1832." 

The bill was read a second time (April 7) by the overwhelming 
majority of 340 against 210. Even those who most disliked the 
measure admitted that a majority of this size could not be made 
light of, though they went on in charity to say that it did not rep- 
resent the honest opinion of those who composed it. It was, in 
fact, as such persons argued, the strongest proof of the degradation 
brought into our politics by the act of 1867. "All the bribes of 
Danby or of Walpole or of Pelham," cried one excited critic, "all 
the bullying of the Tudors, all the lobbying of George III, 



584 English Historians 

would have been powerless to secure it in the most corrupt or the 
most servile days of the ancient House of Commons." 

§ 2. Stoppage in the House 0} Lords } 

On the third reading the opposition disappeared from the House, 
and on Mr. Gladstone's prompt initiative it was placed on record 
in the journals that the bill had been carried by a unanimous ver- 
dict. It went to the Lords, and by a majority first of fifty-nine 
and then of fifty they put what Mr. Gladstone mildly called "an 
effectual stoppage on the bill, or in other words they did practically 
reject it." The plain issue, if we may call it plain, was this. What 
the Tories, with different degrees of sincerity, professed to dread was 
that the election might take place on the new franchise, but with an 
unaltered disposition of Parliamentary seats. At heart the bulk 
of them were as little friendly to a lowered franchise in the coun- 
ties as they had been in the case of the towns before Mr. Disraeli 
educated them. But this was a secret dangerous to let out, for the 
enfranchised workers in the towns would never understand why 
workers in the villages should not have a vote. 

Apart from this the Tory leaders believed that unless the allot- 
ment of seats went with the addition of a couple of million new 
voters, the prospect would be ruinously unfavorable to their party, 
and they offered determined resistance to the chance of a jockey- 
ing operation of this kind. At least one very eminent man among 
them had privately made up his mind that the proceeding supposed 
to be designed by their opponents — their distinct professions 
notwithstanding — would efface the Tory party for thirty years 
to come. Mr. Gladstone and his government on the other hand 
agreed, on grounds of their own and for reasons of their own, that 
the two changes should come into operation together. What they 
contended was, that to tack redistribution on to franchise was to 
scotch or kill franchise. "I do not hesitate to say," Mr. Glad- 
stone told his electors, "that those who are opposing us, and 
making use of this topic of redistribution of seats as a means for 
defeating the Franchise Bill, know as well as we do that, had we 
been such idiots and such dolts as to present to Parliament a bill 
for the combined purpose, or to bring in two bills for the two pur- 
poses as one measure — I say, they know as well as we do, that a 
disgraceful failure would have been the result of our folly, and that 
we should have been traitors to you, and to the cause we had in 
hand." Disinterested onlookers thought there ought to be no 



The Enfranchisement of the Rural Laborer 585 

great difficulty in securing the result that both sides desired. As 
the Duke of Argyll put it to Mr. Gladstone, if in a private business 
two men were to come to a breach, when standing so near to one 
another in aim and profession, they would be shut up in bedlam. 
This is just what the judicious reader will think to-day. 



§ 3. Double Agitation throughout the Country 



i/ 



The controversy was transported from Parliament to the plat- 
form, and a vigorous agitation marked the autumn recess. It was 
a double agitation. What began as a campaign on behalf of the 
rural householder, threatened to end as one against hereditary 
legislators. It is a well-known advantage in movements of this 
sort to be not only for, but also against, somebody or something; 
against a minister, by preference, or if not an individual, then 
against a body. A hereditary legislature in a community that 
has reached the self-governing stage is an anachronism that makes 
the easiest of all marks for mockery and attack, so long as it lasts. 
Nobody can doubt that if Mr. Gladstone had been the frantic 
demagogue or fretful revolutionist that his opponents thought, 
he now had an excellent chance of bringing the question of the 
House of Lords irresistibly to the front. As it was, in the midst 
of the storm raised by his lieutenants and supporters all over the 
country, he was the moderating force, elaborately appealing, as 
he said, to the reason rather than the fears of his opponents. . . . 

In August, Mr. Gladstone submitted to the Queen a memoran- 
dum on the political situation. It was much more elaborate than 
the ordinary official submissions. Lord Granville was the only 
colleague who had seen it, and Mr. Gladstone was alone respon- 
sible for laying it before the sovereign. It is a masterly state- 
ment of the case, starting from the assumption for the sake of argu- 
ment that the Tories were right and the Liberals wrong as to the 
two bills; then proceeding on the basis of a strongly expressed 
desire to keep back a movement for organic change; next urging 
the signs that such a movement would go forward with irresistible 
force if the bill were again rejected, and concluding thus : — 

"I may say in conclusion that there is no personal act if it be 
compatible with personal honor and likely to contribute to an end 
which I hold very dear, that I would not gladly do for the purpose 
of helping to close the present controversy, and in closing it to 
prevent the growth of one probably more complex and more for- 
midable." 



586 English Historians 

This document, tempered, unrhetorical, almost dispassionate, 
was the starting-point of proceedings that, after enormous difficul- 
ties had been surmounted by patience and perseverance, working 
through his power in Parliament and his authority in the coun- 
try, ended in final pacification and a sound political settlement. It 
was Mr. Gladstone's statesmanship that brought this pacification 
into sight and within reach. 

The Queen was deeply struck both by the force of his arguments 
and the earnest tone in which they were pressed. Though doubting 
whether there was any strong desire for a change in the position of 
the House of Lords, still she "did not shut her eyes to the possible 
gravity of the situation" (August 31). She seemed inclined to 
take some steps for ascertaining the opinion of the leaders of 
Opposition, with a view to inducing them to modify their programme. 
The Duke of Richmond visited Balmoral (September 13); but 
when Mr. Gladstone, then himself on Deeside, heard what had 
passed in the direction of compromise, he could only say, "Waste 
of breath ! " To all suggestions of a dissolution on the case in 
issue, Mr. Gladstone said to a confidential emissary from Bal- 
moral : — 

"Never will I be a party to dissolving in order to determine 
whether the Lords or the Commons were right upon, the Franchise 
Bill. If I have anything to do with dissolution, it will be a disso- 
lution upon organic change in the House of Lords. Should this 
bill be again rejected in a definite manner, there will be only two 
courses open to me: one to cut out of public life, which I shall 
infinitely prefer ; the other to become a supporter of organic change 
in the House of Lords, which I hate and which I am making all 
this fuss in order to avoid. We have a few weeks before us to try 
and avert the mischief. After a second rejection it will be too 
late. There is perhaps the alternative of advising a large creation 
of peers ; but to this there are great objections, even if the Queen 
were willing. I am not at present sure that I could bring myself 
to be a party to the adoption of a plan like that of 1832." 

When people talked to him of dissolution as a means of bring- 
ing the Lords to account, he replied in scorn: "A marvellous 
conception ! On such a dissolution, if the country disapproved of 
the conduct of its representatives, it would cashier them; but, 
if it disapproved of the conduct of the peers, it would simply have 
to see them resume their place of power, to employ it to the best of 
their ability as opportunity might serve, in thwarting the desires 
of the country expressed through its representatives." 



The Enfranchisement of the Rural Laborer 587 

It was reported to Mr. Gladstone that his speeches in Scotland 
(though they were marked by much restraint) created some dis- 
pleasure at Balmoral. He wrote to Lord Granville (September 
26) : — 

'"The Queen does not know the facts. If she did, she would 
have known that while I have been compelled to deviate from the 
intention of speaking only to constituents which (with much 
difficulty) I kept until Aberdeen, I have thereby (and again with 
much difficulty in handling the audiences, every one of which 
would have wished a different course of proceeding) been enabled 
to do much in the way of keeping the question of organic change 
in the House of Lords out of the present stage of the contro- 
versy." . . . 

§ 4. Mr. Gladstone and the House of Lords 

Meanwhile Mr. Gladstone was hard at work in other directions. 
He was urgent (October 2) that Lord Granville should make every 
effort to bring more peers into the fold to save the bill when it 
reappeared in the autumn session. He had himself "garnered in 
a rich harvest" of bishops in July. On previous occasions he had 
plied the episcopal bench with political appeals, and this time he 
wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury : — 

" July 21, 1884. I should have felt repugnance and scruple about 
addressing your Grace at any time on any subject of a political 
nature if it were confined within the ordinary limits of such sub- 
jects. But it seems impossible to refuse credit to the accounts 
which assure us that the peers of the Opposition, under Lord Salis- 
bury and his coadjutors, are determined to use all their strength 
and influence for the purpose of throwing out the Franchise Bill in 
the House of Lords ; and thus of entering upon a conflict with the 
House of Commons, from which at each step in the proceeding it 
may probably become more difficult to retire, and which, if left to 
its natural course, will probably develop itself into a constitutional 
crisis of such an order as has not occurred since 1832. ..." 

To Tennyson, the possessor of a spiritual power even more than 
archiepiscopal, who had now a place among peers temporal, he 
addressed a remonstrance (July 6) : — 

"... Upon consideration I cannot help writing a line, for I must 
hope that you will reconsider your intention. The best mode in 
which I can support a suggestion seemingly so audacious is by in- 
forming you, that all sober-minded conservative peers are in great 



588 English Historians 

dismay at this wild proceeding of Lord Salisbury; that the ultra- 
Radicals and Parnellites, on the other hand, are in a state of glee, as 
they believe, and with good reason, that the battle once begun will 
end in some great humiliation to the House of Lords, or some 
important change in its composition. That (to my knowledge) 
various bishops of conservative leanings are, on this account, going 
to vote with the government — as may be the case with lay peers 
also. That you are the only peer, so far as I know, associated with 
Liberal ideas or the Liberal party, who hesitates to vote against 
Lord Salisbury." 

In the later stage of this controversy, Tennyson shot the well- 
known lines at him : — 

Steersman, be not precipitate in thine act 

Of steering, for the river here, my friend, 

Parts in two channels, moving to one end — 

This goes straight forward to the cataract : 

That streams about the bend. 

But tho' the cataract seems the nearer way, 

Whate'er the crowd on either bank may say, 

Take thou " the bend," 'twill save thee many a day. 

To a poet who made to his generation such exquisite gifts of 
beauty and pleasure, the hardest of party-men may pardon un- 
seasonable fears about franchise and one-horse constituencies. As 
matter of fact and in plain prose, this taking of the bend was exactly 
what the steersman had been doing, so as to keep other people 
out of the cataracts. . . . 

To Mr. Chamberlain, who was in his element, or in one of his 
elements, Mr. Gladstone wrote (October 8) : — 

"I see that Salisbury by his declaration in the Times of Satur- 
day, that the Lords are to contend for the simultaneous passing 
of the two bills, has given you an excellent subject for denuncia- 
tion, and you may safely denounce him to your heart's content. 
But I earnestly hope that you will leave us all elbow room on 
other questions which may arise. If you have seen my letters 
(virtually) to the Queen, I do not think that you will have found 
reason for alarm in them. I am sorry that Hartington the other 
day used the word compromise, a word which has never passed my 
lips, though I believe he meant nothing wrong. If we could find 
anything which, though surrendering nothing substantial, would 
build a bridge for honorable and moderate men to retreat by, I 
am sure you would not object to it. But I have a much stronger 
plea for your reserve than any request of my own. It is this, that 



The Enfranchisement of the Rural Laborer 589 

the Cabinet has postponed discussing the matter until Wednesday 
simply in order that you may be present and take your share. 
They meet at twelve. I shall venture to count on your doing noth- 
ing to narrow the ground left open to us, which is indeed but a 
stinted one." 

§ 5. Attempts at Conciliation 

Three days later (October 11) the Queen, writing to the prime 
minister, was able to mark a further stage : — 

"Although the strong expressions used by ministers -in their 
recent speeches have made the task of conciliation undertaken by 
the Queen a most difficult one, she is so much impressed with the 
importance of the issue at stake that she has persevered in her 
endeavors, and has obtained from the leaders of the Opposition 
an expression of their readiness to negotiate on the basis of Lord 
Hartington's speech at Hanley. In the hope that this may lead 
to a compromise, the Queen has suggested that Lord Hartington 
may enter into communication with Lord Salisbury, and she trusts, 
from Mr. Gladstone's telegram received this morning, that he will 
empower Lord Hartington to discuss the possibility of an agree- 
ment with Lord Salisbury." 

In acknowledgment, Mr. Gladstone offered his thanks for all her 
Majesty's "well-timed efforts to bring about an accommodation." 
He could not, however, he proceeded, feel sanguine as to obtain- 
ing any concession from the leaders, but he is very glad that Lord 
Hartington should try. 

Happily, and as might have been expected by anybody who 
remembered the action of the sensible peers who saved the Reform 
Bill in 1832, the rash and headstrong men in high places in the 
Tory party were not allowed to have their own way. Before the 
autumn was over, prudent members of the Opposition became 
uneasy. They knew that in substance the conclusion was fore- 
gone, but they knew also that just as in their own body there was 
a division between hothead and moderate, so in the Cabinet they 
could count upon a Whig section, and probably upon the prime 
minister as well. They noted his words spoken in July: "It is 
not our desire to see the bill carried by storm and tempest. It is 
our desire to see it win its way by persuasion and calm discussion 
to the rational minds of men." 

Meanwhile Sir Michael Hicks-Beach had already, with the knowl- 
edge and without the disapproval of other leading men on the 
Tory side, suggested an exchange of views to Lord Hartington, 



590 English Historians 

who was warmly encouraged by the Cabinet to carry on com- 
munications, as being a person peculiarly fitted for the task, 
" enjoying full confidence on one side," as Mr. Gladstone said 
to the Queen, "and probably more on the other side than any other 
minister could enjoy." These two cool and able men took the 
extension of county franchise for granted, and their conferences 
turned pretty exclusively on redistribution. Sir Michael pressed 
the separation of urban from rural areas, and what was more spe- 
cifically important was his advocacy of single-member or one-horse 
constituencies. His own long experience of a scattered agricul- 
tural division had convinced him that such areas with household 
suffrage would be unworkable. Lord Hartington knew the ad- 
vantage of two-member constituencies for his party, because they 
made an opening for one Whig candidate and one Radical. But 
he did not make this a question of life or death, and the ground was 
thoroughly well hoed and raked. Lord Salisbury, to whom the 
nature of these communications had been made known by the 
colleague concerned, told him of the suggestion from the Queen, 
and said that he and Sir Stafford Northcote had unreservedly 
accepted it. So far the Cabinet had found the several views in 
favor with their opponents as to electoral areas rather more sweep- 
ing and radical than their own had been, and they hoped that on 
the basis thus informally laid they might proceed to the more de- 
veloped conversation with the two official leaders. Then the Tory 
ultras interposed. 

On the last day of October the Queen wrote to Mr. Gladstone 
from Balmoral : — 

"The Queen thinks that it would be a means of arriving at some 
understanding if the leaders of the parties in both houses could 
exchange their views personally. The Duke of Argyll or any other 
person unconnected for the present with the government or the 
Opposition might be employed in bringing about a meeting, and in 
assisting to solve difficulties. The Queen thinks the government 
should in any project forming the basis of resolutions on redistri- 
bution to be proposed to the House distinctly define their plans 
at such a personal conference. The Queen believes that were 
assurance given that the redistribution would not be wholly in- 
imical to the prospects of the Conservative party, their concurrence 
might be obtained. The Queen feels most strongly that it is of 
the utmost importance that in this serious crisis such means, even 
if unusual, should be tried, and knowing how fully Mr. Gladstone 
recognizes the great danger that might arise by prolonging the 



The Enfranchisement of the Rural Laborer 591 

conflict, the Queen earnestly trusts that he will avail himself of such 
means to obviate it." 

The Queen then wrote to Lord Salisbury in the same sense in 
which she had written to the prime minister. Lord Salisbury 
replied that it would give him great pleasure to consult with any- 
body the Queen might desire, and that in obedience to her com- 
mands he would do all that lay in him to bring the controversy 
finally to a just and honorable issue. He went on, however, to say, 
in the caustic vein that was one of his ruling traits, that while 
cheerfully complying with the Queen's wishes, he thought it right 
to add that, so far as his information went, no danger attached 
to the prolongation of the controversy for a considerable time, 
nor did he believe that there was any real excitement in the coun- 
try about it. The Queen, in replying (November 5), said that 
she would at once acquaint Mr. Gladstone with what he had said. 

§ 6. Re-introduction of the Franchise Bill 

The autumn session began, and the Franchise Bill was introduced 
again. Three days later, in consequence of a communication from CX 
the other camp, the debate on the second reading was conciliatory; 
but the Tories won a by-election, and the proceedings in committee 
became menacing and clouded. Discrepancies abounded in the 
views of the Opposition upon redistribution. When the third read- 
ing came (November 11), important men on the Tory side insisted 
on the production of a Seats Bill, and declared there must be 
no communication with the enemy. Mr. Gladstone was elabo- 
rately pacific. If he could not get peace, he said, at least let it be 
recorded that he desired peace. The parleys of Lord Harting- 
ton and Sir Michael Hicks-Beach came to an end. 

Mr. Gladstone, late one night soon after this (November 14), 
had a long conversation with Sir Stafford Northcote at the house 
of a friend. He had the authority of the Cabinet (not given for this 
special interview) to promise the introduction of a Seats Bill before 
the committee stage of the Franchise Bill in the Lords, provided 
he was assured that it could be done without endangering or re- 
tarding franchise. Northcote and Mr. Gladstone made good 
progress on the principles of redistribution. Then came an 
awkward message from Lord Salisbury, that the Lords could not 
let the Franchise Bill through, until they got the Seats Bill from 
the Commons. So negotiations were again broken off. 

The only hope now was that a sufficient number of Lord Salis- 



$yl English Historians 

bury's adherents would leave him in the lurch, if he did not close 
with what was understood to be Mr. Gladstone's engagement, to 
procure and press a Seats Bill as soon as ever franchise was out of 
danger. So it happened, and the door that had thus been shut 
speedily opened. Indirect communication reached the treasury 
bench that seemed to show the leaders of Opposition to be again 
alive. There were many surmises, everybody was excited, and 
two great Tory leaders in the Lords called on Lord Granville 
one day, anxious for a modus vivendi. Mr. Gladstone in the 
Commons, in conformity with a previous decision of the Cabinet, 
declared the willingness of the government to produce a bill or ex- 
plain its provisions, on receiving a reasonable guarantee that the 
Franchise Bill would be passed before the end of the sittings. The 
ultras of the Opposition still insisted on making bets all round that 
the Franchise Bill would not become law; besides betting, they 
declared they would die on the floor of the House in resisting an 
accommodation. A meeting of the party was summoned at the 
Carlton Club for the purpose of declaring war to the knife, and 
Lord Salisbury was reported to hold to his determination. This 
resolve, however, proved to have been shaken by Mr. Gladstone's 
language on a previous day. The general principles of redistri- 
bution had been sufficiently sifted, tested, and compared to show 
that there was no insuperable discrepancy of view. It was made 
clear to Lord Salisbury circuitously, that though the government 
required adequate assurances of the safety of franchise before 
presenting their scheme upon seats, this did not preclude private 
and confidential illumination. So the bill was read a second time. 

§ 7. Party Negotiations and Compromise 

All went prosperously forward. On November 19, Lord Salis- 
bury and Sir S. Northcote came to Downing Street in the after- 
noon, took tea with the prime minister, and had a friendly conver- 
sation for an hour in which much ground was covered. The heads 
of the government scheme were discussed and handed to the 
Opposition leaders. Mr. Gladstone was well satisfied. He was 
much struck, he said after, with the quickness of the Tory leader, 
and found it a pleasure to deal with so acute a man. Lord Salis- 
bury, for his part, was interested in the novelty of the proceeding ; 
for no precedent could be found in our political or party history 
for the discussion of a measure before its introduction between 
the leaders of the two sides. This novelty stirred his curiosity, 
while he also kept a sharp eye on the main party chance. He 



The Enfranchisement of the Rural Laborer 593 

proved to be entirely devoid of respect for tradition, and Mr. 
Gladstone declared himself to be a strong conservative in com- 
parison. The meetings went on for several days through the 
various parts of the questions, Lord Hartington, Lord Granville, 
and Sir Charles Dilke being also taken into council — the last 
of the three being unrivalled master of the intricate details. 

The operation was watched with jealous eyes by the Radicals, 
though they had their guardians in the Cabinet. To Mr. Bright 
who, having been all his life denounced as a violent republican, 
was now in the view of the new school hardly even so much as a 
sound Radical, Mr. Gladstone thought it well to write (November 
25) words of comfort, if comfort were needed : — 

"I wish to give you the assurance that in the private communica- 
tions which are now going on, Liberal principles such as we should 
conceive and term them are in no danger. Those with whom we 
confer are thinking without doubt of party interests, as affected 
by this or that arrangement; but these are a distinct matter, and 
I am not so good at them as some others ; but the general propo- 
sition which I have stated is I think one which I can pronounce 
with some confidence. . . . The whole operation is essentially 
delicate and slippery, and I can hardly conceive any other cir- 
cumstances in which it would be justified, but in the present very 
peculiar case I think it is not only warranted, but called for." 

On November 27 all was well over, and Mr. Gladstone was able 
to inform the Queen that "the delicate and novel communications" 
between the two sets of leaders had been brought to a happy 
termination. "His first duty," he said, "was to tender his grate- 
ful thanks to your Majesty for the wise, gracious, and steady in- 
fluence on your Majesty's part which has so powerfully contributed 
to bring about this accommodation, and to avert a serious crisis 
of affairs." He adds that "his cordial acknowledgments are due 
to Lord Salisbury and Sir Stafford Northcote for the manner in 
which they have conducted their difficult communications." 
The Queen promptly replied : "I gladly and thankfully return your 
telegrams. To be able to be of use is all I care to live for now." 
By way of winding up negotiations so remarkable. Mr. Gladstone 
wrote to Lord Salisbury to thank him for his kindness, and to say 
that he could have desired nothing better in candor and equity. 
Their conversation on the Seats Bill would leave him none but the 
most agreeable recollections. 1 

1 Compare this account with Churchill, Lord Randolph Churchill, Vol. I, 
chaps, vi. ff. 

2Q 



CHAPTER V 

THE CABINET SYSTEM 

The great measures which transformed England into a political 
democracy left untouched the outward forms of the Constitution. 
The sovereign retained nominally at least the ancient dignities 
and prerogatives, and the hereditary House of Lords continued to 
hold its full powers as an integral part of the legislature. In 
external forms the government appeared very much as it did in 
the days of Henry VIII when the king appointed and dismissed 
his ministers at will and summoned Parliament at his pleasure. 
However, since that time the practice had grown up of compelling 
the sovereign to accept only those ministers who had the support 
of a majority of the House of Commons. This practice, which was 
greatly furthered in the age of Walpole, became settled custom in 
the nineteenth century, and must be thoroughly examined by any 
one who would know the actual workings of the government 
of Great Britain. In Mr. Bagehot's famous book on the English 
Constitution we have a charming account of many features of 
the English system. 

§ i . The Crown and Selection of Ministers 1 

The efficient secret of the English Constitution may be described 
as the close union, the nearly complete fusion, of the executive 
and legislative powers. No doubt by the traditional theory, as it 
exists in all the books, the goodness of our Constitution consists 
in the entire separation of the legislative and executive authorities, 
but in truth its merit consists in their singular approximation. The 
connecting link is the Cabinet. By that new word we mean a com- 
mittee of the legislative body selected to be the executive body. 

1 Bagehot, The English Constitution, chap. ii. 
594 



The Cabinet System 595 

The legislature has many committees, but this is the greatest. It 
chooses for this, its main committee, the men in whom it has most 
confidence. It does not, it is true, choose them directly; but it 
is nearly omnipotent in choosing them indirectly. A century ago 
the crown had a real choice of ministers, though it had no longer 
a choice in policy. During the long reign of Sir R. Walpole 
he was obliged not only to manage Parliament, but to manage the 
palace. He was obliged to take care that some court intrigue did 
not expel him from his place. The nation then selected the Eng- 
lish policy, but the crown chose the English ministers. They were 
not only in name, as now, but in fact, the queen's servants. Rem- 
nants, important remnants, of this great prerogative still remain. 
The discriminating favor of William IV made Lord Melbourne 
head of the Whig party when he was only one of several rivals. . . . 
But as a rule, the nominal prime minister is chosen by the legis- 
lature, and the real prime minister for most purposes — the leader 
of the House of Commons — almost without exception is so. 

§ 2. The Prime Minister and Choice of his Associates 

There is nearly always some one man plainly selected by the voice 
of the predominant party in the predominant house of the legis- 
lature to head that party, and consequently to rule the nation. We 
have in England an elective first magistrate as truly as the Ameri- 
cans have an elective first magistrate. The queen is only at the 
head of the dignified part of the Constitution. The prime minister 
is at the head of the efficient part. The crown is, according to 
the saying, the " fountain of honor"; but the treasury is the spring 
of business. Nevertheless our first magistrate differs from the 
American. He is not elected directly by the people, he is elected 
by the representatives of the people. He is an example of "double 
election." The legislature chosen, in name, to make laws, in fact 
finds its principal business in making and in keeping an executive. 

The leading minister so selected has to choose his associates, 
but he only chooses among a charmed circle. The position of most 
men in Parliament forbids their being invited to the Cabinet; the 
position of a few men insures their being invited. Between the 
compulsory list whom he must take, and the impossible list whom 
he cannot take, a prime minister's independent choice in the for- 
mation of a Cabinet is not very large ; it extends rather to the divi- 
sion of the Cabinet offices than to the choice of Cabinet ministers. 
Parliament and the nation have pretty well settled who shall have 



596 English Historians 

the first places; but they have not discriminated with the same 
accuracy which man shall have which place. The highest patron- 
age of a prime minister is, of course, a considerable power, though 
it is exercised under close and imperative restrictions — though it 
is far less than it seems to be when stated in theory, or looked at 
from a distance. 

The Cabinet, in a word, is a board of control chosen by the 
legislature, out of persons whom it trusts and knows, to rule the 
nation. The particular mode in which the English ministers are 
selected ; the fiction that they are, in any political sense, the queen's 
servants; the rule which limits the choice of the Cabinet to the 
members of the legislature are accidents unessential to its definition 
— historical incidents separable from its nature. Its characteristic 
is that it should be chosen by the legislature out of persons agreeable 
to and trusted by the legislature. Naturally these are principally 
its own members; but they need not be exclusively so. A Cabinet 
which included persons not members of the legislative assembly 
might still perform all useful duties. Indeed, the peers who 
constitute a large element in modern Cabinets are members, nowa- 
days, only of a subordinate assembly. 

The House of Lords still exercises several useful functions; but 
the ruling influence, the deciding faculty, has passed to what, 
using the language of old times, we still call the Lower House — 
to an assembly which, though inferior as a dignified institution, 
is superior as an efficient institution. A principal advantage of 
the House of Lords in the present age indeed consists in its thus 
acting as a reservoir of Cabinet ministers. Unless the composition 
of the House of Commons were improved, or unless the rules 
requiring Cabinet ministers to be members of the legislature were 
relaxed, it would undoubtedly be difficult to find, without the Lords, 
a sufficient supply of chief ministers. But the detail of the com- 
position of a Cabinet, and the precise method of its choice, are not 
to the purpose now. 

§ 3. Principal Features of the Cabinet 

The first and cardinal consideration is the definition of a Cabinet. 
We must not bewilder ourselves with the inseparable accidents 
until we know the necessary essence. A Cabinet is a combining 
committee, a hyphen which joins, a buckle which fastens, the leg- 
islative part of the State to the executive part of the State. In its 
origin it belongs to the one, in its functions it belongs to the other. 



The Cabinet System 597 

The most curious point about the Cabinet is that so very little 
is known about it. The meetings are not only secret in theory, 
but secret in reality. By the present practice no official minute 
in all ordinary cases is kept of them. Even a private note is dis- 
couraged and disliked. The House of Commons, even in its most 
inquisitive and turbulent moments, would scarcely permit a note 
of a Cabinet meeting to be read. No minister who respected the 
fundamental usages of political practice would attempt to read 
such a note. The committee, which unites the law-making power 
to the law-executing power which, by virtue of that combination, 
is, while it lasts and holds together, the most powerful body in the 
State, is a committee wholly secret. No description of it, at once 
graphic and authentic, has ever been given. It is said to be some- 
times like a rather disorderly board of directors, where many speak 
and few listen, though no one knows. 

But a Cabinet, though it is a committee of the legislative assembly, 
is a committee with a power which no assembly would, unless for 
historical accidents, and after happy experience, have been per- 
suaded to intrust to any committee. It is a committee which can 
dissolve the assembly which appointed it ; it is a committee with a 
suspensive veto; a committee with a power of appeal. Though 
appointed by one Parliament, it can appeal if it chooses to the next. 
Theoretically, indeed, the power to dissolve Parliament is intrusted 
to the sovereign only; and there are vestiges of doubt whether in 
all cases a sovereign is bound to dissolve Parliament when the Cabi- 
net asks him to do so. But neglecting such small and dubious 
exceptions, the Cabinet which was chosen by one House of Com- 
mons has an appeal to the next House of Commons. 

The chief committee of the legislature has the power of dis- 
solving the predominant part of that legislature — that which at a 
crisis is the supreme legislature. The English system, therefore, 
is not an absorption of the executive power by the legislative 
power; it is a fusion of the two. Either the Cabinet legislates and 
acts, or else it can dissolve. It is a creature, but it has the power of 
destroying its creators. It is an executive which can annihilate the 
legislature, as well as an executive which is the nominee of the 
legislature. It was made, but it can unmake; it was derivative 
in its origin, but it is destructive in its action. 

This fusion of the legislative and executive functions may, to 
those who have not much considered it, seem but a drv and small 
matter to be the latent essence and effectual secret of the English 
Constitution; but we can only judge of its real importance by 



598 English Historians 

looking at a few of its principal effects, and contrasting it very 
shortly with its great competitor, which seems likely, unless care 
be taken, to outstrip it in the progress of the world. That com- 
petitor is the presidential system. The characteristic of it is that 
the President is elected from the people by one process, and the 
House of Representatives by another. The independence of the 
legislative and executive powers is the specific quality of presiden- 
tial government, just as their fusion and combination is the precise 
principle of Cabinet government. 

§ 4. Comparison of Presidential and Cabinet Systems 

First, compare the two in quiet times. The essence of a civil- 
ized age is, that administration requires the continued aid of 
legislation. One principal and necessary kind of legislation is 
taxation. The expense of civilized government is continually 
varying. It must vary if the government does its duty. The 
miscellaneous estimates of the English government contain an 
inevitable medley of changing items. Education, prison disci- 
pline, art, science, civil contingencies of a hundred kinds, require 
more money one year and less another. The expense of defence, 
the naval and military estimates, vary still more as the danger of 
attack seems more or less imminent, as the means of retarding 
such danger become more or less costly. If the persons who have 
to do the work are not the same as those who have to make the 
laws, there will be a controversy between the two sets of persons. 
The tax-imposers are sure to quarrel with the tax-requirers. The 
executive is crippled by not getting the law it needs, and the legis- 
lature is spoiled by having to act without responsibility; the 
executive becomes unfit for its name since it cannot execute what 
it decides on ; the legislature is demoralized by liberty, by taking 
decisions of which others (and not itself) will suffer the effects. 

In America so much has this difficulty been felt that a semi- 
connection has grown up between the legislature and the executive. 
When the Secretary of the Treasury of the Federal government 
wants a tax, he consults upon it with the chairman of the financial 
committee of Congress. He cannot go down to Congress himself 
and propose what he wants ; he can only write a letter and send it. 
But he tries to get a chairman of the finance committee who likes 
his tax ; through that chairman he tries to persuade the committee to 
recommend such a tax; by that committee he tries to induce the 
House to adopt that tax. But such a chain of communications is 



The Cabinet System 599 

liable to continual interruptions; it may suffice for a single tax 
on a fortunate occasion, but will scarcely pass a complicated 
budget — we do not say in a war or a rebellion — we are now 
comparing the Cabinet system and the presidential system in 
quiet times, but in times of financial difficulty. Two clever 
men never exactly agreed about a budget. We have by present 
practice an Indian Chancellor of the Exchequer talking English 
finance at Calcutta, and an English one talking Indian finance 
in England. But the figures are never the same, and the views 
of policy are rarely the same. One most angry controversy has 
amused the world, and probably others scarcely less interesting 
are hidden in the copious stores of our Anglo-Indian correspon- 
dence. 

But relations something like these must subsist between the 
head of a finance committee in the legislature and a finance min- 
ister in the executive. They are sure to quarrel, and the result is 
sure to satisfy neither. And when the taxes do not yield as they 
were expected to yield, who is responsible ? Very likely the Sec- 
retary of the Treasury could not persuade the chairman; very 
likely the chairman could not persuade his committee; very likely 
the committee could not persuade the assembly. Whom, then, 
can you punish ; whom can you abolish when your taxes run short ? 
There is nobody save the legislature — a vast miscellaneous body 
difficult to punish, and the very persons to inflict the punishment. 

Nor is the financial part of administration the only one which 
requires in a civilized age the constant support and accompani- 
ment of facilitating legislation. All administration does so. In 
England, on a vital occasion, the Cabinet can compel legislation by 
the threat of resignation, and the threat of dissolution; but neither 
of these can be used in a presidential State. There the legislature 
cannot be dissolved by the executive government, and it does not 
need a resignation, for it has not to find the successor. Accord- 
ingly, when a difference of opinion arises, the legislature is forced 
to fight the executive, and the executive is forced to fight the 
legislative; and so very likely they contend to the conclusion of 
their respective terms. There is, indeed, one condition of things in 
which this description, though still approximately true, is, never- 
theless, not exactly true, and that is, when there is nothing to fight 
about. Before the Rebellion in America, owing to the vast dis- 
tance of other States, and the favorable economical condition of the 
country, there were very few considerable objects of contention ; 
but if that government had been tried by the English legislation 



600 English Historians 

of the last thirty years, the discordant action of the two powers, 
whose constant cooperation is essential to the best government, 
would have shown itself much more distinctly. 

§ 5. Political Education of the Nation 

Nor is this the worst. Cabinet government educates the nation; 
the presidential does not educate it, and may corrupt it. It has 
been said that England invented the phrase, "Her Majesty's op- 
position " ; that it was the first government which made a criticism 
of administration as much a part of the polity as administration 
.i itself. This critical opposition is the consequence of Cabinet gov- 
ernment. The great scene of debate, the great engine of popular 
instruction and political controversy, is the legislative assembly. 
A speech there by an eminent statesman, a party movement by a 
great political combination, are the best means yet known for 
arousing, enlivening, and teaching a people. The Cabinet system 
insures such debates, for it makes them the means by which states- 
men advertise themselves for future and confirm themselves in 
present governments. It brings forward men eager to speak, and 
gives them occasions to speak. 

The deciding catastrophes of Cabinet governments are critical 
divisions preceded by fine discussions. Everything which is worth 
saying, everything which ought to be said, most certainly will be 
said. Conscientious men think they ought to persuade others; 
selfish men think they would like to obtrude themselves. The 
nation is forced to hear two sides — all the sides, perhaps, of that 
which most concerns it. And it likes to hear, it is eager to know. 
Human nature despises long arguments which come to nothing; 
heavy speeches which precede no motion; abstract disquisitions 
which leave visible things where they were. But all men heed 
great results, and a change of government is a great result. It has 
a hundred ramifications; it runs through society; it gives hope 
to many, and it takes away hope from many. It is one of those 
marked events which, by its magnitude and its melodrama, im- 
press men even too much. And debates which have this catas- 
trophe at the end of them, or may so have it, are sure to be listened 
to, and sure to sink deep into the national mind. 

Travellers even in the Northern States of America, the greatest 

and best of presidential countries, have noticed that the nation was 

/ " not .specially addicted to politics"; that they have not a public 

opinion finished and chastened as that of the English has been 



The Cabinet System 60 1 

finished and chastened. A great many hasty writers have charged 
this defect on the "Yankee race," on the Anglo-American char- 
acter; but English people, if they had no motive to attend to 
politics, certainly would not attend to politics. At present there 
is business in their attention. They assist at the determining 
crisis ; they assist or help it. Whether the government will go out 
or remain, is determined by the debate, and by the division in 
Parliament. And the opinion out of doors, the secret pervading 
disposition of society, has a great influence on that division. The 
nation feels that its judgment is important, and it strives to judge. 
It succeeds in deciding because the debates and the discussions 
give it the facts and the arguments. 

But under a presidential government a nation has, except at the 
electing moment, no influence; it has not the ballot box before it; 
its virtue is gone, and it must wait till its instant of despotism 
again returns. It is not incited to form an opinion like a nation 
under a Cabinet government, nor is it instructed like such a nation. 
There are doubtless debates in the legislature, but they are pro- 
logues without a play. There is nothing of a catastrophe about 
them ; you cannot turn out the government. The prize of power 
is not in the gift of the legislature, and no one cares for the leg- 
islature. The executive, the great centre of power and place, sticks 
irremovable; you cannot change it in any event. The teaching 
apparatus which has educated our public mind, which prepares 
our resolutions, which shapes our opinions, does not exist. No 
presidential country needs to form daily, delicate opinions, or is 
helped in forming them. 

It might be thought that the discussions in the press would 
supply the deficiencies in the Constitution; that by a reading 
people, especially, the conduct of their government would be as 
carefully watched, that their opinion about it would be as con- 
sistent, as accurate, as well considered, under a presidential as 
under a Cabinet polity. But the same difficulty oppresses the press 
which oppresses the legislature. It can do nothing. It cannot 
change the administration ; the executive was elected for such and 
such years, and for such and such years it must last. People 
wonder that so literary a people as the Americans — a people 
who read more than any people who ever lived, who read so many 
newspapers — should have such bad newspapers. The papers 
are not so good as the English, because they have not the same 
motive to be good as the English papers. 



6o2 English Historians 



§ 6. The Press and Politics 

At a political "crisis," as we say, that is, when the fate of an 
administration is unfixed, when it depends on a few votes, yet 
unsettled, upon a wavering and veering opinion, effective articles 
in great journals become of essential moment. The Times has 
made many ministries. When, as of late, there has been a long 
continuance of divided Parliaments, of governments which were 
without " brute voting power," and which depended on intellectual 
strength, the support of the most influential organ of English opin- 
ion has been of critical moment. If a Washington newspaper could 
have turned out Mr. Lincoln, there would have been good writ- 
ing and fine argument in the Washington newspapers. But the 
Washington newspapers can no more remove a president during his 
term of place than the Times can remove a lord mayor during his 
year of office. Nobody cares for a debate in Congress which 
" comes to nothing," and no one reads long articles which have 
no influence on events. The Americans glance at the heads of 
news and through the paper. They do not enter upon a discus- 
sion. They do not think of entering upon a discussion which 
would be useless. 

§ 7. Weakness of the Presidential Executive 

After saying that the division of the legislature and the executive 
in presidential governments weakens the legislative power, it may 
seem a contradiction to say that it also weakens the executive power. 
But it is not a contradiction. The division weakens the whole 
aggregate force of government — the entire imperial power, and 
therefore it weakens both its halves. The executive is weakened 
in a very plain way. In England a strong Cabinet can obtain the 
concurrence of the legislature in all acts which facilitate its admin- 
v istration ; it is itself, so to say, the legislature. But a president 
may be hampered by the Parliament, and is likely to be hampered. 
The natural tendency of the members of every legislature is to make 
themselves conspicuous. They wish to gratify an ambition laud- 
able or blamable ; they wish to promote the measures they think 
best for the public welfare ; they wish to make their will felt in great 
affairs. All these mixed motives urge them to oppose the execu- 
tive. They are embodying the purpose of others if they aid ; they 
are advancing their own opinions if they defeat; they are first if 



The Cabinet System 603 

they vanquish; they are auxiliaries if they support. The weak- 
ness of the American executive used to be the great theme of all 
critics before the Confederate Rebellion. Congress and commit- 
tees of Congress of course impeded the executive when there was 
no coercive public sentiment to check and rule them. 

But the presidential system not only gives the executive power 
an antagonist in the legislative power, and so makes it weaker; 
it also enfeebles it by impairing its intrinsic quality. A Cabinet is 
elected by a legislature; and when that legislature is composed 
of fit persons, that mode of electing the executive is the very best. 
It is a case of secondary election, under the only conditions in 
which secondary election is preferable to primary. Generally 
speaking, in an electioneering country (I mean in a country full of 
political life, and used to the manipulation of popular institutions), 
the election of candidates to elect candidates is a farce. The 
Electoral College of America is so. It was intended that the depu- 
ties when assembled should exercise a real discretion, and by in- 
dependent choice select the President. But the primary electors 
take too much interest. They only elect a deputy to vote for Mr. 
Lincoln or Mr. Breckenridge, and the deputy only takes a ticket 
and drops that ticket in an urn. He never chooses or thinks of 
choosing. He is but a messenger, a transmitter; the real de- 
cision is in those who chose him — who chose him because they knew 
what he would do. 

It is true that the British House of Commons is subject to the 
same influences. Members are mostly, perhaps, elected because 
they will vote for a particular ministry rather than for purely 
legislative reasons. But — and here is the capital distinction — 
the functions of the House of Commons are important and continu- 
ous. It does not, like the Electoral College, in the United States, 
separate when it has elected its ruler; it watches, legislates, seats, 
and unseats ministries from day to day. Accordingly it is a real 
electoral body. The Parliament of 1857, which, more than any 
other Parliament of late years, was a Parliament elected to support 
a particular premier, which was chosen, as Americans might say, 
upon the "Palmerston ticket," before it had been in existence 
two years dethroned Lord Palmerston. Though selected in the 
interest of a particular ministry, it in fact destroyed that ministry. 

A good Parliament, too, is a capital choosing body. If it is 
fit to make laws for a country, its majority ought to represent the 
general average intelligence of that country; its various members 
ought to represent the various special interests, special opinions, 



J 



604 English Historians 

special prejudices, to be found in that community. There ought 
to be an advocate for every particular sect, and a vast neutral body 
of no sect, homogeneous and judicial, like the nation itself. Such 
a body, when possible, is the best selecter of executives that can be 
imagined. It is full of political activity; it is close to political life ; 
it feels the responsibility of affairs which are brought as it were to its 
threshold; it has as much intelligence as the society in question 
chances to contain. It is what Washington and Hamilton strove 
to create — an Electoral College of the picked men of the nation. 

The best mode of appreciating its advantages is to look at the 
alternative. The competing constituency is the nation itself, and 
this is, according to theory and experience, in all but the rarest 
cases a bad constituency. Mr. Lincoln, at his second election, 
being elected when all the Federal States had set their united hearts 
on one single object, was voluntarily reelected by an actually 
choosing nation. He embodied the object in which every one was 
absorbed. But this is almost the only presidential election of 
which so much can be said. In almost all cases the President is 
chosen by a machinery of caucuses and combinations too 'Com- 
plicated to be perfectly known and too familiar to require de- 
scription. He is not the choice of the nation, he is the choice of 
the wire-pullers. A very large constituency in quiet times is the 
necessary, almost the legitimate, subject of electioneering man- 
agement ; a man cannot know that he does not throw his vote away 
except he votes as part of some great organization ; and if he votes 
as a part, he abdicates his electoral function in favor of the mana- 
gers of that association. The nation, even if it chose for itself, 
would, in some degree, be an unskilled body; but when it does not 
choose for itself, but only as latent agitators wish, it is like a large, 
lazy man, with a small, vicious mind — it moves slowly, and heavily, 
but it moves at the bidding of a bad intention; it "means little, 
but it means that little ill." 

§ 8. Influence of Separation of Powers on the Legislature 

And as the nation is less able to choose than a Parliament, so 
it has worse people to choose out of. The American legislators of 
the last century have been much blamed for not permitting the 
ministers of the President to be members of the assembly; but, 
with reference to the specific end which they had in view, they saw 
clearly and decided wisely. They wished to keep "the legislative 
branch absolutely distinct from the executive branch"; they 



The Cabinet System 605 

believed such a separation to be essential to a good constitution; 
they believed such a separation to exist in the English, which the 
wisest of them thought the best Constitution. And, to the effec- 
tual maintenance of such a separation, the exclusion of the Presi- 
dent's ministers from the legislature is essential. If they are not 
excluded, they become the executive, they eclipse the President 
himself. A legislative chamber is greedy and covetous; it ac- 
quires as much, it concedes as little as possible. The passions of 
its members are its rulers; the law-making faculty, the most com- 
prehensive of the imperial faculties, is its instrument; it will take 
the administration if it can take it. Tried by their own aims, the 
founders of the United States were wise in excluding the min- 
isters from Congress. 

But though this exclusion is essential rt) the presidential system 
of government, it is not for that reason a small evil. It causes the 
degradation of public life. Unless a member of the legislature 
be sure of something more than speech, unless he is incited by the 
hope of action, and chastened by the chance of responsibility, a 
first-rate man will not care to take the place, and will not do much 
if he does take it. To belong to a debating society adhering to an 
executive (and this is no inapt description of a Congress under a 
presidential constitution) is not an object to stir a noble ambition, 
and is a position to encourage idleness. The members of a Parlia- 
ment excluded from office can never be comparable, much less 
equal, to those of a Parliament not excluded from office. The 
presidential government, by its nature, divides political life into 
two halves: an executive half and a legislative half; and, by so 
dividing it, makes neither half worth a man's having — worth 
his making] it a continuous career, worthy to absorb, as Cabinet 
government absorbs, his whole soul. The statesmen from whom 
a nation chooses under a presidential system are much inferior to 
those from whom it chooses under a Cabinet system, while the 
selecting apparatus is also far less discerning. 

§ 9. Cabinet and Presidential Government in Critical Times 

All these differences are more important at critical periods, 
because government itself is more important. A formed public 
opinion, a respectable, able, and disciplined legislature, a well- 
chosen executive, a Parliament and an administration not thwarting 
each other, but cooperating with each other, are of greater con- 
sequence when great affairs are in progress than when small affairs 



606 English Historians 

are in progress ; when there is much to do than when there is little 
to do. But in addition to this, a Parliamentary or Cabinet consti- 
tution possesses an additional and special advantage in very dan- 
gerous times. It has what we may call a reserve of power fit for 
and needed by extreme exigencies. 

The principle of popular government is that supreme power, 
the determining efficacy in matters political, resides in the people — 
not necessarily or commonly in the whole people, in the numerical 
majority, but in a chosen people, a picked and selected people. 
It is so in England ; it is so in all free countries. Under a Cabinet 
constitution at a sudden emergency this people can choose a ruler 
for the occasion. It is quite possible and even likely that he would 
not be the ruler before the occasion. The great qualities, the im- 
perious will, the rapid energy, the eager nature fit for a great crisis 
are not required — are impediments — in common times. A 
Lord Liverpool is better in everyday politics than a Chatham; a 
Louis Philippe far better than a Napoleon. By the structure of 
the world we often want, at the sudden occurrence of a grave tem- 
pest, to change the helmsman, to replace the pilot of the calm by 
the pilot of the storm. 

In England we have had so few catastrophes since our Consti- 
tution attained maturity that we can hardly appreciate this latent 
excellence. We have not needed a Cavour to rule a revolution — ■ 
a representative man above all men fit for a great occasion, and by 
a natural, legal mode brought in to rule. But even in England, 
at what was the nearest to a great sudden crisis which we have 
had of late years, at the Crimean difficulty, we used this inherent 
power. We abolished the Aberdeen Cabinet, the ablest we have 
had, perhaps, since the Reform Act — a Cabinet not only adapted, 
but eminently adapted, for every sort of difficulty save the one it 
had to meet, which abounded in pacific discretion, and was want- 
ing only in the "daemonic element"; we chose a statesman who 
had the sort of merit then wanted, who, when he feels the steady 
power of England behind him, will advance without reluctance, 
and will strike without restraint. As was said at the time, "We 
turned out the Quaker, and put in the pugilist." 

But under a presidential government you can do nothing of the 
kind. The American government calls itself a government of the 
supreme people ; but at a quick crisis, the time when a sovereign 
power is most needed, you cannot find the supreme people. You 
have got a Congress elected for one fixed period, going out perhaps 
by fixed instalments, which cannot be accelerated or retarded ; you 



The Cabinet System 607 

have a President chosen for a fixed period, and immovable dur- 
ing that period : all the arrangements are for stated times. There 
is no elastic element; everything is rigid, specified, dated. Come 
what may, you can quicken nothing and can retard nothing. You 
have bespoken your government in advance, and whether it suits 
you or not, whether it works well or works ill, whether it is what 
you want or not, by law you must keep it. In a country of com- 
plex foreign relations it would mostly happen that the first and 
most critical year of every war would be managed by a peace 
premier, and the first and most critical years of peace by a war 
premier. In each case the period of transition would be irrevo- 
cably governed by a man selected not for what he was to introduce, 
but what he was to change; for the policy he was to abandon, not 
for the policy he was to administer. 

Bibliographical Note 

Burgess, Political Science and Constitutional Law, Vol. II, pp. 209 ff. 
Dicey, The Law of the Constitution, chap, i, on the nature of parliamentary 
government; chaps, xiv and xv, on the conventions of the constitution and 
their sanction. Anson, Law and Custom of the Constitution, Vol. II, chap. iii. 
Blauvelt, The Development of Cabinet Government in England. 



CHAPTER VI 

LABOR AND SOCIALISM IN ENGLISH POLITICS 

The general direction of the political movements and legislation 
in Great Britain during the last one hundred years has been deter- 
mined by the interests and ideals of the three great economic 
classes : landlords, capitalists, and workingmen. The following 
article, written almost twenty years ago by Mr. Clarke, is a most 
suggestive and interesting commentary on the conflicts of these 
classes and the recent tendencies in legislation for social reform. 
As Mr. Clarke prophesies at the close, the labor party has grown 
in influence and numbers. Two new labor groups have been 
added to the Social Democratic Federation which he describes. 
The Independent Labor party was organized at Bradford in 
1893 with a distinctive socialist programme. The Labor Represen- 
tation Committee, supported by trades unionists, socialists, and 
labor sympathizers, was established in 1900. The latter organiza- 
tion is designed to promote the interests of the working-class and 
aims at securing the election of working-class representatives to 
Parliament. The result of this labor and socialist activity was the 
return of upwards of fifty socialist and labor representatives at 
the election held in 1906. Part of these representatives form a 
distinct group and promise to wield no little influence in the 
shaping of legislation. It remains to be seen whether this is 
a temporary revolt against special grievances concerning educa- 
tion and labor legislation, or whether it is the beginning of a com- 
pact labor party in some measure comparable to the socialist 
party in Germany. 

608 



Labor and Socialism in English Politics 609 



§ 1. Definition of the Term Socialism l 

Some years ago a well-known English politician and political 
economist is reported to have said that whatever might be the 
case in continental countries, socialism was impossible in England, 
and that any socialist propaganda there would prove a ridiculous 
fiasco. The remark seemed to suggest that insular habit of thought 
often attributed to Englishmen, which presupposes an insur- 
mountable barrier between Great Britain and the Continent. But 
whether that was so or not, the remark was unfortunate in view of 
the very striking socialistic development which has since obtained 
in England. Probably no person equally well informed would 
venture to make a similar observation at the present time. 

For good or evil the socialist movement has obtained something 
more than a foothold in England, while British legislation partakes 
more and more of the nature of quasi-socialist enactments. To 
so great an extent is this the case that an amiable and estima- 
ble peer, Lord Wemyss, recently called attention in the House of 
Lords to the spread of socialism, and charged both political parties 
with pandering to it in their legislation. The most eminent 
English thinker, Mr. Herbert Spencer, has also been moved to 
take up his parable against socialism in a little volume entitled 
The Man versus the State. And quite recently no less im- 
portant a person than Sir William Harcourt exclaimed in the 
House of Commons, "We are all socialists now." No one 
supposes that Sir William Harcourt uses the term socialist 
in the same sense as Marx used it or as it is used by any 
socialist party in any civilized country. By socialism Marx 
meant the collective ownership of the instruments of production, 
while by the same term, Sir William Harcourt probably signifies 
the regulation by law of the relations between those who own 
these instruments and those who work on some fixed wage or pay 
a competition rent to the owners. And no doubt this distinc- 
tion is real and important. But it remains to be seen whether 
such an admission of the doctrine of "ransom," as Professor 
Sidgwick has recently sanctioned in the Contemporary Review, 
or the regulation of rents by the State, as in Ireland under the 
Gladstone Land Act, will not ultimately tend to that further and 
more complete socialism which is advocated by the Collectivist 

1 Reprinted from the Political Science Quarterly, Vol. Ill, 1888 
pp. 549 ff. By permission of Ginn & Company, Publishers. 
2 R 



6 io English Historians 

party. The present paper proposes not so much to discuss this 
interesting question as to consider briefly the actual course of 
English political development and to elucidate the present con- 
dition of things in Great Britain. Are Lord Wemyss, Mr. Spencer, 
and Sir William Harcourt correct in their diagnosis, or was the 
above-mentioned political economist right in saying that socialism 
was impossible in England ? 

The word socialism has perhaps merited its claim to be one of 
the great words of the modern world by reason of the different 
constructions which may be put upon it — just like the words 
liberty and Christianity, which are also used in the loosest possible 
way. The word socialist is used here in its strictest economic 
sense. A socialist is one who believes that the necessary instru- 
ments of production should be held and organized by the commu- 
nity, instead of by individuals or groups of individuals within or 
outside of that community. There may be infinite differences of 
opinion as to the way in which that result should be brought 
about; there may be an indefinite variety of connotations and 
inferences concerning the bearing of the new economic doctrine 
on religion, marriage, the family, and so forth. The adoption of 
socialism may involve fundamental changes in the whole structure 
of our social life, but with all this for the time we have nothing to 
do. . . . The socialist, then, for my purpose, is one who would 
transfer gradually or otherwise, by direct or indirect means, the 
ownership of the instruments of production (land, mines, telegraphs, 
railways, machinery, banks of issue) from individuals to the com- 
munity. And the questions we have now to ask and answer are 
Is England becoming in this sense socialist, or is socialism in this 
sense possible or impossible in England? And further, Have 
any recent movements helped to bring about any marked change 
in the course of public thought and of public legislation ? 

§ 2. Development of the Laisser-jaire Policy 

And first we must observe that interference by legislation with 
"private enterprise" has been steadily increasing in England dur- 
ing the last seventy years. The zenith of the laisser-jaire theory 
was attained about the beginning of the present (nineteenth) 
century, ever since which it has declined until it is now practically 
abandoned. Early in the century, England was engaged in the 
most gigantic of her many wars — a war carried on by a great 
commercial minister for preeminently commercial ends. The 



Labor and Socialism in English Politics 611 

real character of the struggle between Pitt and Napoleon has been 
largely lost sight of, owing to a cloud of vague phrases about 
patriotism, liberty, and religion. No doubt there came ultimately 
an issue between Napoleonic despotism and European liberty. 
But Pitt himself was under no illusions. He cared little or noth- 
ing for the picturesque corruptions and historical traditions which 
appealed to the imagination of Burke. Pitt started as a reformer, 
imbued with the doctrines of Adam Smith, and as a reformer he 
remained in intellect even while he was giving his immense talent 
to the service of reaction. In theories of commercial legislation^ 
he was far ahead of any contemporary statesman, and he believed 
all along in a reformed Parliament and in religious liberty. Pitt 
never backed up the continental coalition against France for the 
sake of "altar and throne." He had a much more tangible object 
in view, viz. : to secure for his country undisputed commercial 
supremacy. His aim was to complete the edifice begun by Will- 
iam III and the Whigs of 1688, and continued by Walpole and 
Chatham. 

One of the chief meanings of 1688 was the transference of 
the government into the hands of the moneyed class. It was 
the period of the formation of the national debt and the Bank of 
England ; and under Pitt the classes interested in the national 
debt and the Bank of England became supreme in the State. 
The boroughmongers and the rich Indian nabobs possessed them- 
selves of Parliament, and the "old nobility" was swamped with 
successful contractors and wealthy fundholders. The capital con- 
trolled by this class was used by the ideal statesman of the class 
to secure the supremacy of the class. The policy of laisser jaire 
was the special invention of that class. 

At the same time a new class, that of the manufacturers, was 
rising into power. The inventions of Arkwright and Crompton 
date from the latter half of the eighteenth century, during which 
period England's great cotton manufacture grew to imposing 
proportions. Aided by the new machinery, by an abundant sup- 
ply of minerals, by England's insular position, and by the genius 
of the people for industry, the manufacturing class became power- 
ful, and those ugly places, the large industrial towns of England, 
began to grow to enormous size. The English manufacturers were 
originally protectionists, as witness Irish commercial legislation and 
the general colonial policy which they supported. But as soon as 
their position was secure, it was obvious that they would become 
free traders and advocates of laisser jaire, and the subsequent 



612 English Historians 

free-trade legislation of Peel marked perhaps the culmination of 
their power. 

§ 3. Laisser- jaire Policy Challenged 

But the reign of laisser jaire was soon challenged, and why? 
Because of the growth of machine industry, the consequent dis- 
placement of labor, and the new discomfort and dislocations which 
had arisen. The horrible cruelties of the early factory and mine 
system in England have been so fully laid bare by official docu- 
ments that any attempt to tell over again the tale of horror is super- 
fluous. The foundations of England's greatness were cemented 
by the blood of English working classes. But apart from the 
cruelty perpetrated, two other results connected themselves with 
the new era. The question of the unemployed arose as the direct 
result of mac) line industry, and the tendency of wages toward a 
minimum manifested itself in the absence of any organization on 
the part of the workers. Obviously laisser jaire was an impossible 
policy; society simply could not hold together on any such basis. 
The attacks made upon machinery by starving weavers may have 
been foolish ; but the weavers saw clearly that in some way or 
other the new machines had altered their position, had rendered 
life harder for the many, and employment more precarious. It 
was impossible to permit the new industrial relationship to be un- 
controlled. Thus English statesmen abandoned laisser jaire, not 
because of any abstract ideas about the functions of the State, 
but simply because they were compelled by the pressure of facts. 
The first of a long series of enactments for the protection of labor 
was passed in 1802; it was the beginning of the end of laisser 
jaire. 

But it is commonly assumed that the whole Liberal and 
Radical movement in England has been essentially a movement 
having for its watchwords liberty, absence of state regulation, 
freedom of contract. Is this so? What may be roughly termed 
the Liberal movement in England has its origin in three distinct 
schools : (1) There were those Whigs who adhered to Fox and 
who regarded with friendly eyes the proceedings of the French 
Revolutionists up till the time of the September massacres and who 
even after that date wished well to the French republic. This 
class w r as never large, and it was demoralized by the temporary 
withdrawal of Fox from Parliament. (2) There was next the small 
Benthamite School (to use a convenient phrase), of whom Price 
and Priestly were active apostles, whose doctrines were summed up 



Labor and Socialism in English Politics 613 

in Godwin's Political Justice, and whose Nestor was the venerable 
Jeremy Bentham. This school of political thought was clearly 
affiliated with that of the French philosophes ; its members were 
ardent and zealous reformers, thoroughly imbued with the critical 
ideas of the eighteenth century, and believers in the " perf ectability 
of the species." (3) There was also the popular school, which 
derived its main inspiration from Thomas Paine, and whose lead- 
ers and orators were Cobbett, Cartwright, and Hunt. This school 
was of the rough and ready order ; its members did not speculate 
very deeply, but they saw clearly the abuses under which the 
country was suffering, and they were honestly desirous of improv- 
ing the condition of the people as well as vehemently opposed to 
the court, the aristocracy, and the Church. If any one man can 
be said to be the father of popular English radicalism, Thomas 
Paine is that man: his mark is upon it to-day. All these three 
schools went to the making up of the English progressive move- 
ment of the earlier part of the nineteenth century. Can it be said 
that a party thus composed was favorable to laisser /aire ? 

The truth is that the movement was of a complex character, 
having diverse and even contradictory aims. Some of its leaders 
were mainly interested in getting rid of abuses, others in affirming 
new political ideas. Some wanted to make a bonfire of old statutes 
and abolish laws restricting freedom of speech, publication, and 
worship. The politics of Bentham and Godwin were certainly 
favorable to that creed of " administrative Nihilism" for which 
Mr. Spencer now stands sponsor. But the popular side of the 
movement was even then dominated by quite different aims and 
had a distinctly socialistic tinge: Cobbett inveighed against the 
fundholders and the debt; Thomas Spence of Newcastle pub- 
lished his able and interesting scheme of land nationalization; 
Robert Owen was preaching theoretic and practising actual so- 
cialism. It is a fundamental error to suppose that English radi- 
calism was originally a new creed as to political machinery; it 
had a social doctrine however ill formulated. And with respect 
even to such a writer as Godwin, it must be remembered that his 
Political Justice was written before the effects of machine in- 
dustry had become visible. Like the French declaration of the 
Rights of Man, it was not so much a prophecy of the new era as the 
summing up of the old; it represented the logical issue of a free 
individualism under simple economic conditions, rather than the 
necessary political results of the new system of collective industry. 

The various groups were united so long as all were equally 



6 14 English Historians 

opposed to Tory rule; but the Liberal reaction of 1830 and the 
compromising legislation which followed had the effect of break- 
ing up this unity. The Whigs forgot their reforming zeal in the 
delights of office; literary Radicalism of the so-called philosophic 
order got into the hands of writers like James Mill, who had little 
else to offer but a series of negations, and the popular Radical move- 
ment merged into Chartism. 

An adequate history of the Chartist movement has yet to be 
written. In every way it was, as Carlyle perceived, a movement 
of deep importance. While it put forward a distinctly political 
programme, it had undoubtedly ulterior social and economic aims. 
This may be gathered from a study of the speeches and writings 
connected with the movement, especially those of Ernest Jones 
and Bronterre O'Brien. It was the only genuine, earnest, serious, 
popular movement in England since the days of the Commonwealth. 
It was an absolutely English creation, due in no sense to foreign 
initiative, and it was environed by a quasi-socialistic atmosphere. 
Its authors desired to gain political power in order to improve the 
condition of English workingmen. 

Had the working classes been enfranchised and had no compet- 
ing programmes been set before them, Chartism would certainly 
have triumphed, and the subsequent course of English politics 
would have been widely different from what it has been. But 
neither of these conditions obtained. The working classes were 
not in possession of the suffrage, and a new factor came into the 
field in the shape of Cobdenism, or M anchesterismus , as the 
uncouth tongue of Germany has it. 

§ 4. The Triumph oj Cobdenism 

I have said above, that, when they felt their ability to compete 
in the world's market with success, it was natural that the English 
manufacturers should be friendly to laisser faire. That they were 
so is shown in their support of Cobdenism. The movement 
directed with so much sagacity by Cobden was essentially 
a middle class, business-men's movement. Its triumph signified 
the supremacy of the manufacturer. Cobden himself as quoted 
in Mr. John Morley's biography (chapter xiii) asserted that his 
aim was to make the middle classes absolute masters of the State, 
and he temporarily succeeded in doing so. That Cobdenism 
should ever have been regarded as a "popular" movement, that 
free trade should ever have been supposed to be a "popular" vie- 



Labor and Socialism in English Politics 615 

tory, can only be attributed to one of those hallucinations which 
are stronger and more enduring in politics and religion than in any 
other departments of human affairs. It is certain that neither the 
aristocracy nor the working-class leaders so regarded it. The 
latter perceived that their Chartist movement was beaten by the 
free-trade, middle-class movement — a fact also noted by Emer- 
son, who was sojourning in England at that time; and they have 
not recovered their position even to this day. The Cobdenite 
victory is easily explained. The Cobden School came to the front 
at a time when the old Whiggism was dying out. It had able men at 
its head, a simple programme of a highly practical character, and 
it was able to draw to an unlimited extent upon the immense 
revenues of the manufacturing class behind it. It appealed, more- 
over, to a middle-class electorate. 

Thus armed Cobdenism stormed successfully the citadel of 
Liberalism and held it for a whole generation. It is this quite 
natural (but entirely misleading) identification of Cobdenism with 
the progressive movement in England which has induced people to 
suppose that English Radicalism means mere absence of restric- 
tion, or " administrative Nihilism." It means nothing of the sort. 
Cobdenism was an intruder in the line of legitimate succession, and 
we shall see directly that the Radicalism of to-day is taking up the 
thread of the Chartist movement. . . . 

§ 5. Growth oj State Interference 

The purely middle-class regime came to an end (the year of 
Palmerston's death curiously coinciding with that of Cobden) and 
the period of proletarian pressure began, or rather, to be more 
strictly accurate, the pressure which had been felt to some extent 
from without now manifested itself within the political parties 
to a far greater degree. The security of the ballot was given to the 
working classes, legislation on social questions became much more 
frequent and advanced in its tendencies, and, above all, a state 
system of public education was adopted with the consent of both 
parties. The so-called Conservative reaction of 1874 was due in 
far greater degree to Liberal quarrels and divisions than to any new 
manifestation of genuine Conservatism. That there was really no 
reaction against state interference was proved by the acts of 1875 
providing for artisans' dwellings and for the full recognition of 
trades unions, by the merchant shipping legislation of the same 
year, and by the extension and completion of the system of 




616 English Historians 

compulsory education in 1876. The Disraeli administration ac- 
complished very little in domestic legislation; but what it did 
accomplish was certainly in the direction of public intervention 
between capital and labor, nominally if not practically in the 
interests of labor. 

This tendency toward quasi-socialistic legislation became much 
more manifest under the Gladstone administration of 1880, for two 
of the most important measures of the very first year of the new 
government were severe blows to the laisser-faire theory. These 
were the Irish Compensation for Disturbance Bill and the Employ- 
ers' Liability Bill. The former measure, it is true, was lost through 
the action of the House of Lords ; but this does not lessen its impor- 
tance as an indication of the socialistic tendency of the Liberal 
legislation. During the Gladstone regime the functions of the 
post-office were greatly enlarged by the adoption of the parcels 
post system whereby private enterprise has been greatly checked. 
The electric lighting legislation and the claim asserted by the 
government over the telephones also mark the same drift towards 
collective control and ownership. 

What are the functions, then, with which we find the British 
government invested at the present time at home and in its 
Indian dependency ? The government has rendered popular edu- 
cation compulsory; it has truck acts to regulate payment of wages, 
mines-regulation acts, factory and workshops acts interfering at 
every point with the liberties of the capitalist, adulteration acts, 
and acts to compensate workmen for injuries due to their em- 
ployers' neglect. The telegraphs have been acquired by the 
State, and the functions of the post-office have been so enlarged 
that besides sending and delivering letters, it now despatches tele- 
grams and is a common carrier and banker on an enormous scale. 
The British State has now one hundred and fifty thousand 
persons in the direct service of the community in purely civil 
employments. The municipal bodies have also extended their 
functions. Municipalities now own public parks and gardens, 
museums and picture galleries, libraries, baths, wash-houses, 
technical schools, gas and water works, cattle markets, street 
railways, concert halls, piers, harbors, dispensaries, hospitals, and 
artisans' dwellings, and in many towns, as, for example, Glasgow 
and Edinburgh, the municipality is the owner of a vast area 
of house property. By recent legislation the municipalities are 
empowered to acquire land to be let by them as allotments to 
laborers and others. Moreover, under the British government, 



Labor and Socialism in English Politics 617 

localities can provide for themselves farms, irrigation works, 
bathing establishments, and can deal in guano, salt, opium, qui- 
nine, etc. The State in England at this moment provides for 
every one needing them, midwifery, nursery, education, board 
and lodging, vaccination, medicine, public worship, amusements, 
burials, and carriage of money and goods. All this, of course, 
means that the State, either in its national or municipal capacity, 
has been gradually absorbing what were private functions, and 
this under a restricted suffrage and despite the immense dead- 
weight of individualism left behind by the Cobden School. Eng- 
land is indeed leaving the days of laisser /aire far behind. . . . 

§ 6. Origin oj the Socialist Movement 

The socialist movement in England is now (1888) about eight 
years old. In 1880 was founded a small body called the "Demo- 
cratic Federation" which, in 1883, prefixed the word social to 
its title and became an avowedly socialist body. At the end of 
1884 it experienced the inevitable fissure which sooner or later 
splits all bodies of advanced reformers in twain, and the "Socialist 
League" arose. A little prior to this a small number of educated 
socialists formed the Fabian Society, which differed from the 
other two bodies in that its members proposed to adopt the policy 
of Quinctus Fabius, dictator, qui cunctando rest it u it rem. These 
three bodies are very small; it is doubtful if their numbers amount 
to a couple of thousand all told, but there is no room for doubt 
as to the influence they have exerted and are exerting on active 
politicians and on a section of the workingmen. While there are 
few definite socialists in England, there is much. unconscious so- 
cialism, especially in London; and this is due mainly to the very 
energetic propaganda carried on in workmen's clubs. Ten years 
ago individualistic secularism of a hard and unimaginative order 
reigned in these places; to-day they are pervaded by a more or 
less socialistic spirit. The change is so striking that none ac- 
quainted with these proletarian institutions can fail to recognize 
it. The working classes of England are not nearly so intelligent 
or impulsive as those of France, and therefore what socialism 
there is, is vaguer in England than in France and does not prompt 
to such decisive and logical action. But it is there, and it is be- 
ginning to affect the skilled workmen. 



618 English Historians 



§ 7. Political Tendencies of Trades Unionism 

Though the trades unions are on the whole somewhat conserva- 
tive, it is noteworthy that for the last five years the address from 
the chair at the annual congress has been of a more or less social- 
istic character, while the active socialistic campaign is largely 
carried on by skilled workmen, such as engineers and compositors. 
At the congress held this year (1888) at Bradford, a resolution was 
carried by an overwhelming majority in favor of the nationaliza- 
tion of land; another resolution demanded direct labor represen- 
tation in Parliament; while a resolution favoring an eight hours' 
working day would have been carried had it not been for certain 
complications into which it is impossible to enter here. Thus we 
see that the socialistic principle as against the let-alone principle 
is making way rapidly among English skilled workers. That this 
is in large measure due to the socialist, propaganda may be in- 
ferred from the fact that it follows almost immediately upon the 
formation of an avowed socialist organization in England. This 
is really a case of post hoc, ergo propter hoc. In England the func- 
tion of revolutionary socialism seems to be similar to the func- 
tion of unitarianism in religion ; it has few positive adherents, but 
it leavens very powerfully the political thought around it. 

§ 8. Tendency of Parliamentary Legislation 

More important, however, than the resolutions of trades union 
congresses is the actual legislation which Parliament is com- 
pelled to take up. There is scarcely an eminent politician in 
either house of Parliament who does not dilate to his audience on 
the virtues of self-help ; but the same men when they come to deal 
with the legislative problems actually before them, are con- 
stantly calling into being new state powers, are constantly extend- 
ing state functions, are perpetually interfering with freedom of 
contract, are forever directing the hands of the legislative Briareus 
towards the multitudinous industries and enterprises which, half a 
century ago, were left to regulate themselves. Such a chronic 
state of legislative activity perpetually increasing, is surely no 
accident. It points to an ever growing collective control over the 
industrial life of the community. 

But further, there are problems before England which are 
likely to be solved in a socialistic sense, and thus to hasten the 



Labor and Socialism in English Politics 619 

socialistic development of the country. These are specially four : 
(1) -Large tracts of land going out of cultivation and the conse- 
quent perpetual decline in agricultural rent; (2) the rehousing 
of the great mass of the unskilled working classes; (3) the 
revelations as to the sweating system recently made before the 
special committee of the House of Lords; and (4) the question 
of the permanently unemployed. It is difficult to see how these 
questions are to be solved on individualistic lines. Even that 
optimist statistician, Mr. Giffen, after attempting to prove that 
the people are better off than they ever were, expresses his convic- 
tion that " something like a revolution" in the condition of the 
people is desirable. But such a revolution can be brought about 
only by the State, i.e. by the people in their corporate capacity. 
Individual effort cannot rebuild East London and house a million 
working people as they ought to be housed. Individual effort 
cannot prevent overtime work in government establishments, 
on railways, in street cars, and omnibuses, and so give occupa- 
tion to the unemployed. Individual effort cannot take hold of 
and cultivate the land of England, nor can it prevent the ground 
landlord from absorbing his "unearned increment" out of the 
industry and enterprise of the people. It is perfectly obvious that 
all these problems will demand the aid of the State in their solution, 
and it is equally obvious that such state action will bring society 
a very long way on in the socialist direction. 

§ 9. Tendency of Political Programmes 

And now let us look for a moment to the attitude of the political 
parties with regard to the social problem and to their probable 
respective programmes, and we shall see, I think, that both parties, 
while repudiating socialism, yet advocate such measures as will 
lead on to socialism and can be logically defended on something 
like socialistic grounds. The Conservative party will rely in the 
main on schemes of state-assisted immigration, on protection, on the 
exclusion of foreign labor, and probably on some compulsory 
insurance scheme borrowed from the Bismarckian system. Al- 
though the Conservative leaders fight shy of protection, nearly 
every one of their followers is a protectionist at heart ; and the recent 
sugar bounties convention is a sign that even the timid leaders of 
the party will go some way to gratify their followers. To the 
exclusion of foreign labor nearly every Conservative candidate in 
London and the large towns will be committed at the next election. 



6io English Historians 

As for the immigration scheme, the people do not take very kindly 
to it, and all acute politicians will be careful not to commit them- 
selves too far in that direction, and the same may be said of any 
state insurance scheme. But to these things in some form, the 
majority of Conservatives will adhere. And be it observed that 
each and all of these schemes involved collective action for the 
supposed benefit of the people. The State will do something that 
the masses may have work to do and bread to eat. In other words, 
it is the collective, the socialist, not the individualist, method which 
Conservatism will adopt. 

Much more decidedly socialistic will be the radical programme. 
Radicals will not send the people out of the country at the public 
expense, but will supply public money to settle them on the land. 
They will propose to tax ground rents and mineral royalties with 
a view to their absorption by the community. They will munici- 
palize land and nationalize railways. As soon as the organized 
working-class vote demands it, they will shorten the hours of labor 
and interfere further with the capitalist in the working of his busi- 
ness. And it is probable that, under the new and almost revo- 
lutionary extension of local self-government, they will start public 
works for the relief of the unemployed. It need not be pointed 
out that every one of these measures would involve a vast increase 
of collective authority and would be an immense step in the social- 
ist direction. 

The conclusion, then, to which the logic of facts drives any com- 
petent and well-informed investigator into English affairs is that 
in no country, probably, is progress being made more rapidly and 
more certainly in the socialist direction. When one compares the 
labor legislation of Great Britain, passed even under middle-class 
rule, with that of France or Belgium, one feels that the former coun- 
try is in these matters half a century ahead of the two latter. It is 
so because the industrial development of England is half a cen- 
tury ahead of that of either France or Belgium, and the great lesson 
of politics is that legislation is determined by the social and eco- 
nomic conditions of the time. The economic development of 
Great Britain is further advanced than that of any other country, 
ancj therefore it is that Great Britain leads the world in socialist 
legislation. And if it be not a paradox to say so, it is that very 
socialistic legislation which prevents in England the wilder devel- 
opments of revolutionary socialism with which the world is familiar 
in the case of France and Germany. It is rather the orderly evo- 
lutionary socialism of Rodbertus than the more revolutionary 



Labor and Socialism in English Politics 621 

socialism of Marx (identical as the doctrines of each may be at 
the bottom) which has a fair prospect of development in England. 

§ 10. Socialism and Local Autonomy 

One other matter needs to be dwelt upon. Englishmen are 
rightly supposed all the world over to be devoted to individual 
liberty, and the superficial student of socialism supposes that under 
it all individual liberty is lost and that every one is merely the agent 
of a huge central bureau. If this were the only kind of socialism 
possible, it might be freely admitted that it would have no chance 
in England. But he is blind to signs of the times who does not 
perceive that a vast movement of decentralization is going on in 
England. The Irish demand for home rule, the cries from Scot- 
land and Wales for some reasonable autonomy, the concessions 
made even by a Conservative ministry in the local government bill, 
and the certain extension of that measure which the next Radical 
government will make — all these are indications that Great 
Britain is being prepared for a kind of socialism wholly different 
from the authoritative centralizing methods of Marx, socialism 
consistent with and in fact dependent on an energetic local life and 
compatible with all kinds of local form and coloring. If, for 
example, the land in England is made public property, it will not 
be through a great central rent-receiving machine at Whitehall, 
but rather through the localities, each of which will be as free 
as is consistent with the union of the whole. Some kind of cen- 
tralizing there must indeed be; some kind of uniformity is insepa- 
rable from the modern industrial system so far as one can see. 
And there is no greater monotony or uniformity or absence of 
individual free play than in the modern factories with which 
industrial England is crowded. It may well be indeed that under 
some rational socialistic system individual liberty may actually 
extend in various important directions, even if it should be con- 
tracted in others. 

The immediate political future is exceedingly problematical. 
It is a period of chaos and bewilderment. The old parties are 
undergoing vast changes, fundamental questions are being asked, 
and probably the next few years will exhibit rapid, shifting scenes 
of a kaleidoscopic character. During this time of change the labor 
party will, unless I am greatly mistaken, take form and develop 
itself, make and unmake ministries, and gradually acquire more 
and more control over the springs of government and the sources 



622 English Historians 

of national power. The politicians will bid for the labor vote 
as they have bid for the Irish vote ; indeed, it is the startling suc- 
cess of Mr. Parnell which has so profoundly influenced the leading 
workers and thinkers in the labor ranks. Mr. Parnell has made 
Parnellites of the Liberal party ; we shall see the leaders of both 
parties before long anxious to do whatever the labor leaders may 
require. 

Bibliographical Note 

Webb, Industrial Democracy, Introduction to the 1902 edition; History 
of Trade Unionism; Problems of Modern Industry ; Socialism in England. 
Gammage, History of the Chartist Movement. Ensor, Modern Socialism, 
especially valuable for the programmes of the various English labor parties 
and leaders. Mackay (editor), A Plea for Liberty, a protest and argument 
against state interference. Porritt, Party Conditions in England, in the 
Political Science Quarterly, June, 1906. 



PART IX 
THE EMPIRE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 

CHAPTER I 

THE ECONOMIC FOUNDATIONS OF IMPERIALISM 

In every European country domestic politics is complicated 
by questions involved in securing new markets for manufactures 
and new areas for the profitable investment of capital. Though 
these great motives are supplemented by religious sentiments and 
by philosophic conceptions concerning the world's civilization, 
they are without doubt the great impelling forces in what is called 
" imperialism." The problem of how far domestic prosperity 
and true civilization are connected with the free outlet of these 
forces, and the military and naval support of mercantile operations, 
is one of the gravest and most important that has ever confronted 
Western nations. In Great Britain the opinion of statesmen and 
publicists has passed through many phases. For a time during the 
middle of the nineteenth century many- of the leading thinkers 
were dominated by a belief that colonies would in time become in- 
dependent States, and that additional imperial complications should 
not be undertaken. Since 1870, however, under the steady press- 
ure of the forces mentioned above, the borders of the British em- 
pire have been steadily advanced, and there has been a strongly 
growing sentiment that the empire should be bound more and more 
closely together and that opportunities for new additions should 
not be allowed to escape. A very thorough analysis of the inner 
character of imperialism and its many problems is to be found in 
Mr. Hobson's Imperialism: a Study. It is not without its con- 

623 



# 



624 English Historians 

troversial aspects, but it is one of the most stimulating books of 
our time on this very important subject. 

§ 1. The Economic Argument jor Imperialism 1 

No mere array of facts and figures adduced to illustrate the eco- 
nomic nature of the new imperialism will suffice to dispel the popu- 
lar delusion that the use of national force to secure new markets 
by annexing fresh tracts of territory is a sound and necessary pol- 
icy for an advanced industrial country like Great Britain. It has 
indeed been proved that recent annexations of tropical countries, 
procured at great expense, have furnished poor and precarious 
markets ; that our aggregate trade with our colonial possessions is 
virtually stationary; and that our most profitable and progressive 
trade is with rival industrial nations, whose territories we have 
no desire to annex, whose markets we cannot force, and whose 
active antagonism we are provoking by our expansive policy. 

But these arguments are not conclusive. It is open to imperial- 
ists to argue thus: "We must have markets for our growing 
manufactures ; we must have new outlets for the investment of our 
surplus capital and for the energies of the adventurous surplus of 
our population: such expansion is a necessity of life to a nation 
with our great and growing powers of production. An ever larger 
share of our population is devoted to the manufactures and com- 
merce of towns, and is thus dependent for life and w r ork upon food 
and raw materials from foreign lands. In order to buy and pay for 
these things we must sell our goods abroad. During the first 
three-quarters of the century we could do so without difficulty by 
a natural expansion of commerce with continental nations and 
our colonies, ail of which were far behind us in the main arts of 
manufacture and the carrying trades. So long as England held a 
virtual monopoly of the world markets for certain important classes 
of manufactured goods, imperialism was unnecessary. During 
the last thirty years this manufacturing and trading supremacy 
has been greatly impaired; other nations, especially Germany, 
the United States, and Belgium, have advanced with great rapidity, 
and while they have not crushed or even stayed the increase of our 
external trade, their competition is making it more and more diffi- 
cult to dispose of the full surplus of our manufactures at a profit. 

1 Hobson, Imperialism: a Study, chap. vi. By permission of J. A. Hob- 
son, Esq., and James Pott & Company, Publishers. 



The Economic Foundations of Imperialism 625 

The encroachments made by these nations upon our old markets, 
even in our own possessions, make it most urgent that we should 
take energetic means to secure new markets. These new mar- 
kets must lie in hitherto undeveloped countries, chiefly in the 
tropics, where vast populations live capable of growing economic 
needs which our manufacturers and merchants can supply. Our 
rivals are seizing and annexing territories for similar purposes, and 
when they have annexed them, close them to our trade. The di- 
plomacy and the arms of Great Britain must be used in order to 
compel the owners of the new markets to deal with us; and ex- 
perience shows that the safest means of securing and developing 
such markets is by establishing "protectorates" or by annexation. 
The present value of these markets must not be taken as a final 
test of the economy of such a policy; the process of educating 
civilized needs which we can supply is of necessity a gradual one, 
and the cost of such imperialism must be regarded as a capital 
outlay, the fruits of which posterity will reap. The new markets 
may not be large, but they form serviceable outlets for the over- 
flow of our great textile and metal industries, and when the vast 
Asiatic and African populations of the interior are reached, a 
rapid expansion of trade may be expected to result. 

"Far larger and more important is the pressure of capital for 
external fields of investment. Moreover, while the manufacturer 
and trader are well content to trade with foreign nations, the ten- 
dency for investors to work towards the political annexation of coun- 
tries which contain their more speculative investments is very 
powerful. Of the fact of this pressure of capital there can be no 
question. Large savings are made which cannot find any profit- 
able investment in this country; they must find employment else- 
where, and it is to the advantage of the nation that they should be 
employed as largely as possible in lands where they can be util- 
ized in opening up markets for British trade and employment for 
British enterprise. 

"However costly, however perilous, this process of imperial 
expansion may be, it is necessary to the continued existence and 
progress of our nation; if we abandon it, we must be content to 
leave the development of the world to other nations, who will 
everywhere cut into our trade, and even impair our means of 
securing the food and raw materials we require to support our 
population. Imperialism is thus seen to be, not a choice, but a 
necessity." 

2S 



626 English Historians 



§ 2. Economic Forces in American Imperialism 

The practical force of this economic argument in politics is 
strikingly illustrated by the recent history of the United States. 
Here is a country which suddenly breaks through a Conservative 
policy, strongly held by both political parties, bound up with every 
popular instinct and tradition, and flings itself into a rapid im- 
perial career for which it possesses neither the material nor the 
moral equipment, risking the principles and practices of liberty 
and equality by the establishment of militarism and the forcible 
subjugation of peoples which it cannot safely admit to the condi- 
tion of American citizenship. 

Is this a mere wild freak of spread-eaglism, a burst of political 
ambition on the part of a nation coming to a sudden realization 
of its destiny ? Not at all. The spirit of adventure, the American 
"mission of civilization," are, as forces making for imperialism, 
clearly subordinate to the driving force of the economic factor. 
The dramatic character of the change is due to the unprecedented 
rapidity of the industrial revolution in the United States during 
the last two decades. During that period the United States, with 
her unrivalled natural resources, her immense resources of skilled 
and unskilled labor, and her genius for invention and organization, 
has developed the best-equipped and most productive manufac- 
turing economy the world has yet seen. Fostered by rigid pro- 
tective tariffs, her metal, textile, tool, clothing, furniture, and other 
manufactures have shot up in a single generation from infancy to 
full maturity, and, having passed through a period of intense com- 
petition, are attaining, under the able control of great trust-makers, 
a power of production greater than has been attained in the most 
advanced industrial countries of Europe. 

An era of cut-throat competition, followed by a rapid process 
of amalgamation, has thrown an enormous quantity of wealth into 
the hands of a small number of captains of industry. No luxury 
of living to which this class could attain kept pace with its rise of 
income, and a process of automatic saving set in upon an un- 
precedented scale. The investment of these savings in other indus- 
tries helped to bring, these under the same concentrative forces. 
Thus a great increase of savings seeking profitable investment is 
synchronous with a stricter economy of the use of existing capital. 
No doubt the rapid growth of a population, accustomed to a high 
and an always ascending standard of comfort, absorbs in the 



The Economic Foundations of Imperialism 627 

satisfaction of its wants a large quantity of new capital. But the 
actual rate of saving, conjoined with a more economical applica- 
tion of forms of existing capital, has exceeded considerably the 
rise of the national consumption of manufactures. The power 
of production has far outstripped the actual rate of consump- 
tion, and, contrary to the older economic theory, has been unable 
to force a corresponding increase of consumption by lowering 
prices. 

This is no mere theory. The history of any of the numerous 
trusts or combinations in the United States sets out the facts with 
complete distinctness. . . . 

American manufactures are saturated with capital and can 
absorb no more. One after another they are seeking refuge from ]/ 
the waste of competition in "combines" which secure a measure 
of profitable peace by restricting the quantity of operative capital. 
Industrial and financial princes in oil, sugar, steel, railroads, 
banking, etc., are faced with the dilemma of either spending more 
than they know how to spend, or forcing markets outside the home 
area. Two economic courses are open to them, both leading 
towards an abandonment of the political isolation of the past and 
the adoption of imperialist methods in the future. Instead of 
shutting down inferior mills and rigidly restricting output to cor- 
respond with profitable sales in the home markets, they may employ 
their full productive power, applying their savings to increase their 
business capital, and, while still regulating output and prices for 
the home market, may " hustle" for foreign markets, dumping 
down their surplus goods at prices which would not be possible 
save for the profitable nature of their home market. So likewise 
they may employ their savings in seeking investments outside their 
country, first repaying the capital borrowed from Great Britain 
and other countries for the early development of their railroads, 
mines, and manufactures, and afterwards themselves becoming a 
creditor class to foreign countries. 

It is this sudden demand for foreign markets for manufactures 
and for investments which is avowedly responsible for the adop- 
tion of imperialism as a political policy and practice by the Re- 
publican party to which the great industrial and financial chiefs 
belong, and which belongs to them. The adventurous enthusi- 
asm of President Roosevelt and his "manifest destiny" and 
"mission of civilization" party must not deceive us. It is Messrs. 
Rockefeller, Pierpont Morgan, Hanna, Schwab, and their asso- 
ciates who need imperialism and who are fastening it upon the 



M 



628 English Historians 

shoulders of the great republic of the West. They need imperial- 
ism because they desire to use the public resources of their country 
to find profitable employment for the capital which otherwise 
would be superfluous. 

It is not indeed necessary to own a country in order to do trade 
with it or to invest capital in it, and doubtless the United States 
can find some vent for their surplus goods and capital in European 
countries. But these countries are for the most part able to make 
provision for themselves ; most of them have erected tariffs against 
manufacturing imports, and even Great* Britain is being urged 
to defend herself by reverting to protection. The big American 
manufacturers and financiers will be compelled to look to China 
and the Pacific and to South America for their most profitable 
chances; protectionists by principle and practice, they will insist 
upon getting as close a monopoly of these markets as they can se- 
cure, and the competition of Germany, England, and other trad- 
ing nations will drive them to the establishment of special political 
relations with the markets they most prize. Cuba, the Philip- 
pines, and Hawaii are but the hors d'ceuvre to whet an appetite 
for an ampler banquet. Moreover, the powerful hold upon poli- 
tics, which these industrial and financial magnates possess, forms a 
separate stimulus, which, as we have shown, is operative in Great 
Britain and elsewhere; the public expenditure in pursuit of an 
imperial career will be a separate immense source of profit to 
these men, as financiers negotiating loans, shipbuilders and owners 
handling subsidies, contractors and manufacturers of armaments, 
and other imperial appliances. 

§ 3. Economic Forces in European Imperialism 

The same needs for markets and opportunities of investment 
exist in European countries, and, as is admitted, drive govern- 
ments along the same path. Over-production in the sense of an 
excessive manufacturing plant, and surplus capital which cannot 
find sound investments within the country, force Great Britain, 
Germany, Holland, and France, to place larger and larger portions 
of their economic resources outside the area of their present 
political .domain, and then stimulate a policy of political ex- 
pansion so as to take in the new areas. The economic sources 
of this movement are laid bare by periodic trade-depressions due 
to an inability of producers to find adequate and profitable markets 
for what they can produce. The majority report of the commis- 



The Economic Foundations of Imperialism 629 

sion upon the depression of trade in 1885 put the matter in a nut- 
shell: "That, owing to the nature of the times, the demand for 
our commodities does not increase at the same rate as formerly; 
that our capacity for production is consequently in excess of our 
requirements, and could be considerably increased at short notice ; 
that this is due partly to the competition of the capital which is 
being steadily accumulated in the country." The minority report 
straightly imputes the condition of affairs to " over-production." 
Germany is at the present suffering severely from what it called 
a glut of capital and of manufacturing power ; she must have new 
markets; her consuls all over the world are "hustling" for trade; 
trading settlements are forced upon Asia Minor ; in East and West 
Africa, in China, and elsewhere the German empire is impelled 
to a policy of colonization and protectorates as outlets for German 
commercial energy. 

Every improvement of methods of production, every concentra- 
tion of ownership and control, seems to accentuate the tendency. 
As one nation after another enters the machine economy and 
adopts advanced industrial methods, it becomes more difficult 
for its manufacturers, merchants, and financiers to dispose profit- 
ably of their economic resources, and they are tempted more and 
more to use their governments in order to secure for their particu- 
lar use some distant undeveloped country by annexation and pro- 
tection. 

The process, we may be told, is inevitable, and so it seems upon 
a superficial inspection. Everywhere appear excessive powers of 
production, excessive capital in search of investment. It is ad- 
mitted by all business men that the growth of the powers of produc- 
tion in their country exceeds the growth in consumption, that more 
goods can be produced than can be sold at a profit, and that more 
capital exists than can find remunerative investment. 

•It is this economic condition of affairs that forms the taproot 
of imperialism. If the consuming public in this country raised 
its standard of consumption to keep pace with every rise of pro- 
ductive powers, there could be no excess of goods or capital clam- 
orous to use imperialism in order to find markets; foreign trade 
would indeed exist, but there would be no difficulty in exchanging 
a small surplus of our manufactures for the food and raw material 
we annually absorbed, and all the savings that we made could find 
employment, if we chose, in home industries. 

There is nothing inherently irrational in such a supposition". 
Whatever is or can be produced, can be consumed, for a claim 



>l 



630 English Historians 

upon it, as rent, profit, or wages, forms part of the real income of 
some member of the community, and he can consume it, or else 
exchange it for some other consumable with some one else who will 
consume it. With everything that is produced a consuming power 
is born. If, then, there are goods which cannot get consumed, or 
which cannot even get produced because it is evident they cannot 
get consumed, and if there is a quantity of capital and labor which 
cannot get full employment because its products cannot get con- 
sumed, the only possible explanation of this paradox is the refusal 
of owners of consuming power to apply that power in effective 
demand for commodities. 

It is, of course, possible that an excess of producing power might 
exist in particular industries by misdirection, being engaged in 
certain manufactures, whereas it ought to have been engaged in 
agriculture or some other use. But no one can seriously contend 
that such misdirection explains the recurrent gluts and consequent 
depressions of modern industry, or that, when over-production is 
manifest in the leading manufactures, ample avenues are open 
for the surplus capital and labor in other industries. The general 
character of the excess of producing power is proved by the exist- 
ence at such times of large bank stocks of idle money seeking, any 
sort of profitable investment and rinding none. 

§ 4. An Analysis of Over-production as the Basis of Imperialism 

The root questions underlying the phenomena are clearly these : 
"Why is it that consumption fails to keep pace automatically in 
a community with power of production?" " Why does under- 
consumption or over-saving occur?" For it is evident that the 
consuming power which, if exercised, would keep tense the reins 
of production, is in part withheld, or in other words is " saved" 
and stored up for investment. All saving for investment does not 
imply slackness of production; quite the contrary. Saving is 
economically justified, from the social standpoint, when the capi- 
tal in which it takes material shape finds full employment in help- 
ing to produce commodities which, when produced, will be con- 
sumed. It is saving in excess of this amount that causes mischief, 
taking shape in surplus capital which is not needed to assist cur- 
rent consumption, and which either lies idle, or tries to oust exist- 
ing capital from its employment, or else seeks speculative use 
abroad under the protection of the government. 

But it may be asked: "Why should there be any tendency to 



The Economic Foundations of Imperialism 631 

over-saving ? Why should the owners of consuming power with- 
hold a larger quantity for savings than can be serviceably em- 
ployed?" Another way of putting the same question is this: 
"Why should not the pressure of present wants keep pace with 
every possibility of satisfying them?" The answer to these 
pertinent questions carries us to the broadest issue of the dis- 
tribution of wealth. If a tendency to distribute income or con- 
suming power according to needs were operative, it is evident that 
consumption would rise with every rise of producing power, for 
human needs are illimitable, and there could be no excess of sav- 
ing. But it is quite otherwise in a state of economic society where 
distribution has no fixed relation to needs, but is determined by 
other conditions which assign, to some people a consuming power 
vastly in excess of needs or possible uses, while others are destitute 
of consuming power enough to satisfy even the full demands of 
physical efficiency. The following illustration may serve to make 
the issue clear. "The volume of production has been constantly 
rising owing to the development of modern machinery. There 
are two main channels to carry off these products, — one channel 
carrying off the product destined to be consumed by the workers, 
and the other channel carrying off the remainder to the rich. The 
workers' channel is in rock-bound banks that cannot enlarge, 
owing to the competitive wage system preventing wages rising 
pro rata with increased efficiency. Wages are based upon cost 
of living, and not upon efficiency of labor. The miner in the poor 
mine gets the same wages per day as the miner in the adjoining 
rich mine. The owner of the rich mine gets the advantage, not 
his laborer. The channel which conveys the goods destined to 
supply the rich is itself divided into two streams. One stream 
carries off what the rich ' spend ' on themselves for the necessities 
and luxuries of life. The other is simply an 'overflow' stream 
carrying off their 'savings.' The channel for spending, i.e. the 
amount wasted by the rich in luxuries, may broaden somewhat; 
but owing to the small number of those rich enough to indulge 
in whims it can never be greatly enlarged, and at any rate it bears 
such a small proportion to the other channel that in no event can 
much hope of avoiding a flood of capital be hoped for from this 
division. The rich will never be so ingenious as to spend enough 
to prevent over-production. The great safety overflow channel 
which has been constantly more and more widened and deepened 
to carry off the ever increasing flood of new capital is that division 
of the stream which carried the savings of the rich, and this is not 



J 



632 English Historians 

only suddenly found to be incapable of further enlargement, but 
actually seems to be in the process of being dammed up." 

Though this presentation over-accentuates the cleavage between 
rich and poor, and over-states the weakness of the workers, it gives 
forcible and sound expression to a most important and ill-recog- 
nized economic truth. The "overflow" stream - of savings is, 
of course, fed not exclusively from the surplus income of the 
"rich"; the professional and industrial middle classes, and to some 
slight extent the. workers, contribute. But the "flooding" is 
distinctly due to the automatic saving of the surplus income of 
rich men. This is, of course, particularly true of America, where 
multi-millionaires rise quickly and find themselves in possession 
of incomes far exceeding the demands of any craving that is known 
to them. To make the metaphor complete, the overflow stream 
must be represented as reentering the stream of production and 
seeking to empty there all the "savings" that it carries. Where 
competition remains free, the result is a chronic congestion of 
productive power and of production, forcing down home prices, 
wasting large sums in advertising and pushing for orders, and 
periodically causing a crisis followed by a collapse, during which 
quantities of capital and labor lie unemployed and unremunerated. 
The prime object of the trust or other combine is to remedy this 
waste and loss by substituting regulation of output for reckless 
over-production. In achieving this it actually narrows or even 
dams up the old channels of investment, limiting the overflow 
stream to the exact amount required to maintain the normal 
current of output. But this rigid limitation of trade, though re- 
quired, for the separate economy of each trust, does not suit the 
trustmaker, who is driven to compensate for strictly regulated 
industry at home by cutting new foreign channels as outlets for his 
productive power and his excessive savings. Thus we reach the 
conclusion that imperialism is the endeavor of the great control- 
lers of industry to broaden the channel for the flow of their sur- 
plus wealth by seeking foreign markets and foreign investments 
to take off the goods and capital they cannot sell or use at home. 

§ 5. An Economic Alternative to Imperialism 

The fallacy of the supposed inevitability of imperial expansion 
as a necessary outlet for progressive industry is now manifest. It 
is not industrial progress that demands the opening up of new 
markets and areas of investment, but mal-distribution of consuming 



The Economic Foundations of Imperialism 633 

power which prevents the absorption of commodities and capital 
within the country. The over-saving which is the economic root 
of imperialism is found by analysis to consist of rents, monopoly 
profits, and other unearned or excessive elements of income, which, 
not being earned by labor of head or hand, have no legitimate 
raison d'etre. Having no natural relation to effort of production, 
they impel their recipients to no corresponding satisfaction 
of consumption; they form a surplus wealth which, having 
no place in the normal economy of production and consumption, 
tends to accumulate as excessive savings. Let any turn in the 
tide of politico-economic forces divert from these owners their 
excess of income and make it flow, either to the workers in higher 
wages or to the community in taxes, so that it will be spent in- 
stead of being saved, — serving in either of these ways to swell the 
tide of consumption, — there will be no need to fight for foreign 
markets or foreign areas of investment. 

Many have carried their analysis so far as to realize the ab- 
surdity of spending half our financial resources in fighting to secure 
foreign markets at times when hungry mouths, ill-clad backs, ill- 
furnished houses, indicate countless unsatisfied material wants 
among our own population. If we may take the careful statistics 
of Mr. Rowntree for our guide, we shall be aware that more than 
one-fourth of the population of our towns is living at a standard 
which is below bare physical efficiency. If, by some economic 
readjustment, the products which flow from the surplus saving of 
the rich to swell the overflow streams could be diverted so as to 
raise the incomes and the standard of consumption of this in- 
efficient fourth, there would be no need for pushful imperialism, 
and the cause of social reform would have won its greatest victory. 
It is not inherent in the nature of things that we should spend our 
natural resources on militarism, war, and risky, unscrupulous 
diplomacy, in order to find markets for our goods and surplus 
capital. An intelligent progressive community, based upon sub- 
stantial equality of educational and economic opportunities, will 
raise its standard of consumption to correspond with every in- 
creased power of production, and can find full employment for 
an unlimited quantity of capital and labor within the limits of the 
country which it occupies. Where the distribution of incomes 
is such as to enable all classes of the nation to convert their felt 
wants into an effective demand for commodities, there can be no 
over-production, no under-employment of capital and labor, and 
no necessity to fight for foreign markets. 



\S 



634 English Historians 

The most convincing condemnation of the current economy 
is conveyed in the difficulty which producers everywhere experi- 
ence in finding consumers for their products — a fact attested by 
the prodigious growth of classes of agents and middlemen, the 
multiplication of every sort of advertising, and the general in- 
crease of the distributive classes. Under a sound economy the 
pressure would be reversed; the growing wants of progressive 
societies would be a constant stimulus to the inventive and opera- 
tive energies of producers, and would form a constant strain upon 
the powers of production. The simultaneous excess of all the 
factors of production, attested by frequently recurring periods of 
trade-depression, is a most dramatic exhibition of the false econ- 
omy of distribution. It does not imply a mere miscalculation in 
the application of productive power, or a brief temporary excess 
of that power; it manifests in an acute form an economic waste 
which is chronic and general throughout the advanced industrial 
nations ; a waste contained in the divorcement of the desire to con- 
sume and the power to consume. 

If the apportionment of income were such as to evoke no ex- 
cessive saving, full constant employment for capital and labor would 
be furnished at home. This, of course, does not imply that there 
would be no foreign trade. Goods that cannot be produced at 
home, or produced as well or as cheaply, would still be purchased 
by ordinary process of international exchange; but here again the 
pressure would be the wholesome pressure of the consumer anx- 
ious to buy abroad what he could not buy at home — not the blind 
eagerness of the producer to use every force or trick of trade or 
politics to find markets for his "surplus" goods. 

The struggle for markets, the greater eagerness of producers 
to sell than of consumers to buy, is the crowning proof of a false 
economy of distribution. Imperialism is the fruit of this false 
economy; "social reform" is its remedy. The primary purpose 
of "social reform," using the term in its economic signification, is 
to raise the wholesome standard of private and public consump- 
tion for a nation, so as to enable the nation to live up to its highest 
standard of production. Even those social reformers who aim 
directly at abolishing or reducing some bad form of consumption, 
as in the temperance movement, generally recognize the neces- 
sity of substituting some better form of current consumption which 
is more educative and stimulative of other tastes, and will assist 
to raise the general standard of consumption. 

There is no necessity to open up new foreign markets ; the home 



The Economic Foundations of Imperialism 635 

markets are capable of indefinite expansion. Whatever is pro- 
duced in England can be consumed in England, provided that the 
"income," or power to demand commodities, is properly distrib- 
uted. This only appears untrue because of the unnatural and 
unwholesome specialization to which this country has been sub- 
jected, based upon a bad distribution of economic resources, 
which has induced an overgrowth of certain manufacturing trades 
for the express -purpose of effecting foreign sales. If the industrial 
revolution had taken place in an England founded upon an equal 
access by all classes to land, education, and legislation, specializa- 
tion in manufactures would not have gone so far (though more 
intelligent progress would have been made, by reason of a widen- 
ing of the area of selection of inventive and organizing talents) ; 
foreign trade would have been less important, though more steady; 
the standard of life for all portions of the population would have 
been high, and the present rate of national consumption would 
probably have given full, constant, remunerative employment 
to a far larger quantity of private and public capital than is now 
employed. For the over-saving or wider consumption that is 
traced to excessive incomes of the rich is a suicidal economy, even 
from the exclusive standpoint of capital; for consumption alone 
vitalizes capital and makes it capable of yielding profits. An 
economy that assigns to the " possessing" classes an excess of 
consuming power which they cannot use, and cannot convert into 
really serviceable capital, is a dog-in-the-manger policy. The so- 
cial reforms which deprive the possessing classes of their surplus 
will not, therefore, inflict upon them the real injury they dread; 
they can only use this surplus by forcing on their country a wreck- 
ing policy of imperialism. The only safety of nations lies in re- 
moving the unearned increments of income from the possessing 
classes, and adding them to the wage income of the working classes 
or to the public income, in order that they may be spent in raising 
the standard of consumption. 

Social reform bifurcates, according as reformers seek to achieve 
this end by raising wages or by increasing public taxation and 
expenditure. These courses are not essentially contradictory, . / 
but are rather complimentary. Working-class movements aim, * 
either by private cooperation or by political pressure on legislative 
and administrative government, at increasing the proportion of 
the national income which accrues to labor in the form of wages, 
pensions, compensation for injuries, etc. State socialism aims 
at getting for the direct use of the whole society an increased share 



6^6 English Historians 

of the "social values," which arise from the closely and essentially 
cooperative work of an industrial society, taxing property and in- 
comes so as to draw into the public exchequer for public expen- 
diture the "unearned elements" of income, leaving to individual 
producers those incomes which are necessary to induce them to 
apply in the best way their economic energies, and to private en- 
terprises those businesses which do not breed monopoly, and 
which the public need not or cannot undertake. These are not, 
indeed, the sole or perhaps the best-avowed objects of social reform 
movements. But for the purposes of this analysis they form the 
kernel. 

Trade unionism and socialism are thus the natural enemies of 
imperialism, for they take away from the "imperialist" classes 
the surplus incomes which form the economic stimulus of imperi- 
alism. 

This does not pretend to be a final statement of the full relations 
of these forces. When we come to political analysis we shall 

V perceive that the tendency of imperialism is to crush trade unionism 
and to "nibble" at or parasitically exploit state socialism. But, 
confining ourselves for the present to the narrowly economic setting, 
trade unionism and state socialism may be regarded as comple- 
mentary forces arrayed against imperialism, in as far as, by divert- 
ing to working class or public expenditure elements of income, 
which would otherwise be surplus savings, they raise the general 
standard of home consumption and abate the pressure for foreign 
markets. Of course, if the increase of working-class income were 
wholly or chiefly "saved," not spent, or if the taxation of unearned 
incomes were utilized for the relief of other taxes borne by the 
possessing classes, no such result as we have described would 
follow. There is, however, no reason to anticipate this result 
from trade union or socialistic measures. Though no sufficient 
natural stimulus exists to force the well-to-do classes to spend in 
further luxuries the surplus incomes which they save, every working- 
class family is subject to powerful stimuli of economic needs, and 
a reasonably governed State would regard as its prime duty the 
relief of the present poverty of public life by new forms of socially 
useful expenditure. 

But we are not here concerned with what belongs to the practical 
issues of political and economic policy. It is the economic theory 
for which we claim acceptance — a theory which, if accurate, dis- 
pels the delusion that expansion of foreign trade, and therefore 
of empire, is a necessity of national life. 



The Economic Foundations of Imperialism 637 



Bibliographical Note 

Reinsch, World Politics and Colonial Administration. Hobhouse, 
Democracy and Reaction. Jebb, Studies in Colonial Nationalism. Cun- 
ingham, A Scheme for Imperial Federation. Conant, The United States 
in the Orient Reich, Imperialism; its prices; its vocation. 



CHAPTER II 

THE GREAT INDIAN MUTINY 

The contest between the British and the Indian princes for the 
decaying Moghul empire, which opened seriously at the battle of 
Plassey in 1757, continued steadily either in open war or by way of 
"peaceful penetration." As a result, by the middle of the nine- 
teenth century the valleys of the Ganges and Indus rivers, the 
eastern and western coast lines and great regions in the heart of 
the peninsula had become immediate possessions of the British; 
the remainder of the body of the peninsula consisted of " protected 
States," also British for practical purposes; and only the northern 
regions towards China remained independent. While many of 
these' States had been added peaceably, the great majority of them 
had been wrested from the natives by force. The germs of 
revolt were thus planted by the conquerors themselves, and in 1857 
the great Mutiny broke out which marked a crisis in the history 
of British dominion in India and a new epoch in the government 
of that country. 

§ 1 . Causes of the Mutiny 1 

The various motives assigned for the Mutiny appear inadequate 
to the European mind. The truth seems to be that native opinion 
throughout India was in a ferment, predisposing men to believe 
\J the wildest stories and to rush into action in a paroxysm of terror. 
Panic acts on an Oriental population like drink upon a European 
mob. The annexation policy of Lord Dalhousie, although dictated 
by the most enlightened considerations, was distasteful to the 
native mind. The spread of education, the appearance at the 

1 Hunter, A Brief History of the Indian Peoples, chap. xv. By permis- 
sion of the Delegates of the Clarendon Press, Oxford. 

638 



The Great Indian Mutiny 639 

same moment of the steam engine and the telegraph wire, seemed 
to reveal a deep plan for substituting an English for an Indian 
civilization. The Bengal Sepoys especially thought that they 
could see farther than the rest of their countrymen. Most of 
them were Hindus of high caste; many of them were recruited 
from Oudh. They regarded our reforms on Western lines as 
attacks on their own nationality, and they knew at first hand what 
annexation meant. They believed it was by their prowess that 
the Punjab had been conquered, and that all India was held. The 
numerous dethroned princes, or their heirs and widows, were the 
first to learn and take advantage of this spirit of disaffection and 
panic. They had heard of the Crimean War, and were told that 
Russia was the perpetual enemy of England. Our munificent 
pensions had supplied the funds with which they could buy the aid 
of skilful intriguers. 

On the other hand, the Company had not sufficiently opened up 
the higher posts in its service to natives of education, talent, or 
proved fidelity. It had taken important steps in this direction in 
respect to the lower grades of appointments. But the prizes 
of Indian official life, many of which are now thrown open to 
natives of India by the crown, were then the monopoly of a handful 
of Englishmen. Shortly before the Mutiny, Sir Henry Lawrence 
pointed out that even the army supplied no career to a native officer 
which could satisfy the reasonable ambition of an able man. He 
insisted on the serious dangers arising from this state of things; 
but his warnings were unheeded till too late. In the crisis of the 
Mutiny they were remembered. He was nominated provisional 
governor-general in event of any accident happening to Lord 
Canning; and the Queen's proclamation, on the transfer of the 
government from the. Company to the crown at the end of the great 
struggle, affirmed the principle which he had so powerfully urged. 
"And it is our further will," are her Majesty's gracious words, 
"that so far as may be, our subjects, of whatever race or 
creed, be freely and impartially admitted to offices in our 
service, the duties of which they may be qualified by their 
education, ability, and integrity duly to discharge." Under 
the Company this liberal policy was unknown. The Sepoy 
Mutiny of 1857, therefore, found many of the Indian princes, 
especially the dethroned dynasties, hostile to the Company; while 
a multitude of its own native officers were either actively dis- 
loyal or indifferent to its fate. 

In this critical state of affairs, a rumor ran through the native 



640 English Historians 

army that the cartridges served out to the Bengal regiments had 
been greased with the fat of pigs — animals which are unclean alike 
to Hindu and Muhammadan. No assurances could quiet the 
minds of the Sepoys. Indeed, the evidence shows that a disas- 
trous blunder had in truth been made in this matter — a blunder 
which, although quickly remedied, was remedied too late. Fires 
occurred nightly in the native lines ; officers were insulted by their 
men; confidence was gone, and only the form of discipline re- 
mained. 

In addition, the outbreak of the storm found the native regi- 
ments denuded of many of their best officers. The administra- 
tion of the great empire to which Dalhousie had put the corner- 
stone required a larger staff than the civil service could supply. 
The practice of selecting able military men for civil posts, which 
had long existed, received a sudden and vast development. Oudh, 
the Punjab, the Central Provinces, British Burma, were admin- 
istered to a large extent by picked officers from the Company's 
regiments. Good and skilful commanders remained; but the 
native army had nevertheless been drained of many of its brightest 
intellects and firmest wills at the very crisis of its fate. At the 
same time the British troops in India had, in spite of Lord Dal- 
housie's remonstrances, been reduced far below the strength which 
the great governor-general declared to be essential to the safety 
of our rule. His earnest representations on this subject, and as to 
the urgent necessity for a reform alike of the native and the British 
armies of India, were lying disregarded in London when the panic 
about the "greased cartridges" spread through the native regi- 
ments, and the storm burst upon Bengal. 

§ 2. The Outbreak and Course of the Mutiny 

On the afternoon of Sunday, May 10, 1857, the Sepoys at Mee- 
rut (Mirath) broke into open mutiny. They forced open the jail, 
and rushed in a wild torrent through the cantonments, cutting 
down any European whom they met. They then streamed off 
to the neighboring city of Delhi, to stir up the native garrison and 
the criminal population of that great city, and to place themselves 
under the authority of the discrowned Mughal Emperor. Meerut 
was then the largest military station in Northern India, with a 
strong European garrison of foot, horse, and guns, sufficient to 
overwhelm the mutineers long before they could have reached 
Delhi. But as the Sepoys acted in irrational panic, so the British 



The Great Indian Mutiny 641 

officers, in but too many cases, behaved with equally irrational 
indecision. The news of the outbreak was telegraphed to Delhi, 
and nothing more was done at Meerut that night. At the moment 
when one strong will might have saved India, no soldier in authority 
at Meerut seemed able to think or act. The next morning the 
Muhammadans of Delhi arose, and all that the Europeans there 
could do was to blow up the magazine. 

A rallying centre and a traditional name were thus given to the 
revolt, which forthwith spread like wildfire through the North- 
western Provinces and Oudh down into Lower Bengal. The 
same narrative must suffice for all the outbreaks, although each 
episode has its own story of sadness and devotion. The Sepoys 
rose on their officers, usually without warning, sometimes after 
protestations of fidelity — protestations in some cases perhaps 
true at the moment. The Europeans, or persons of Christian 
faith, were often massacred; occasionally, also, the women and 
children. The jail was broken open, the treasury plundered, and 
the mutineers marched off to some centre of revolt, to join in what 
had now become a national war. Only in the Punjab were the 
Sepoys anticipated by stern measures of repression and disarma- 
ment carried out by Sir John Lawrence and his lieutenants, 
among whom Edwards and Nicholson stand conspicuous. The 
Sikh population never wavered. Crowds of willing Muhammadan 
recruits joined us from the Afghan hills, and thus the Punjab, 
instead of being itself a source of danger, was able to furnish a por- 
tion of its own garrison for the siege of Delhi. In Lower Bengal 
most of the Sepoys mutinied, and then dispersed in different 
directions. The native armies of Madras and Bombay remained, 
on the whole, true to their colors. In Central India, the contingents 
of some of the great chiefs sooner or later threw in their lot with 
the rebels, but the Muhammadan State of Haidarabad was kept 
loyal by the authority of its able minister, Sir Salar Jang. 

The main interest of the Sepoy War gathers round the three 
cities of Cawnpur, Lucknow, and Delhi. The cantonments at 
Cawnpur contained one of the great native garrisons of 
India. At Bithur, not far off, was the palace of Dundhu Panth, 
the heir of the last Peshwa, whose more familiar name of Nana 
Sahib will ever be handed down to infamy. At first the Nana was 
profuse in his professions of loyalty; but when the Sepoys mutinied 
at Cawnpur on the 6th June, he put himself at their head, and was 
proclaimed Peshwa of the Marathas. The Europeans at Cawn- 
pur, numbering more women and children than fighting men, shut 

2T 



642 English Historians 

themselves up in an ill-chosen hasty intrenchment, where they 
heroically bore a siege for nineteen days under the sun of a tropical 
June. Every one had courage and endurance to suffer or to die ; 
but the directing mind was again absent. On the 27th June, 
trusting to a safe-conduct from the Nana, — a safe-conduct sup- 
posed to hold good as far as Allahabad, — they surrendered, and to 
the number of four hundred and fifty embarked in boats on the 
Ganges. A murderous fire was opened upon them from the river 
bank. Only a single boat escaped; and four men, who swam 
across to the protection of a friendly Raja, survived to tell the tale. 
The rest of the men were massacred on the spot. The women 
and children, numbering one hundred and twenty-five, were 
reserved for the same fate on the 15th July, when the avenging 
army of Havelock was at hand. 

Sir Henry Lawrence, the chief commissioner of Oudh, had fore- 
seen the storm. He fortified and provisioned the residency at 
Lucknow; and thither he retired, with all the European inhabit- 
ants and a weak British regiment, on the 2nd July. Two days 
later, he was mortally wounded by a shell. But the clear head was 
here in authority. Sir Henry Lawrence had deliberately chosen 
his position; and the little garrison held out, under unparalleled 
hardships and against enormous odds, until relieved by Havelock 
and Outram on the 25th of September. But the relieving force 
was itself invested by fresh swarms of rebels, and it was not till 
November that Sir Colin Campbell (afterwards Lord Clyde) cut 
his way into Lucknow and effected the final deliverance of the 
garrison (16th November, 1857). Our troops then withdrew 
to more urgent work, and did not permanently re-occupy Lucknow 
till March, 1858. 

The siege of Delhi began on the 8th June, a month after 
the original outbreak at Meerut. Siege in the proper sense of the 
word it was not; for our army, encamped on the historic "ridge" 
of Delhi, never exceeded eight thousand men, while the rebels 
within the walls were more than thirty thousand strong. In 
the middle of August, Nicholson arrived with a reenforcement 
from the Punjab; his own inspiring presence was perhaps even 
more valuable than the reenforcement he brought. On the 
14th September the assault was delivered; and, after six days' 
desperate fighting in the streets, Delhi was again won. Nicholson 
fell heroically at the head of the storming party. Hodson, the 
daring but unscrupulous leader of a corps of irregular horse, 
hunted down next day the old Mughal Emperor, Bahadur 






The Great Indian Mutiny 643 

Shah, and his sons. The Emperor was afterwards sent a state 
prisoner to Rangoon, where he lived till 1862. As the mob 
pressed in on the guard around the Emperor's sons, near Delhi, 
Hodson thought it necessary to shoot down the princes (who had 
been captured unconditionally) with his own hand. 

After the fall of Delhi and the final relief of Lucknow, the war 
loses its dramatic interest, although fighting still went on in various 
parts of the country for about eighteen months. The population 
of Oudh and Rohilkhand, stimulated by the presence of the Begam 
of Oudh, the Nawab of Bareilly, and Nana Sahib himself, had 
joined the mutinous Sepoys en masse. In this quarter of India 
alone it was the revolt of a people rather than the mutiny of an 
army that had to be quelled. Sir Colin Campbell conducted 
the campaign in Oudh, which lasted through two cold seasons. 
Valuable assistance was lent by Sir Jang Bahadur of Nepal, 
at the head of his gallant Gurkhas. Town after town was 
occupied, fort after fort was stormed, until the last gun had 
been recaptured, and the last fugitive had been chased across 
the frontier by January, 1859. . . . 

§ 3. Settlement in India at the Close of the Mutiny 

The Mutiny sealed the fate of the East India Company, after 
a life of more than two and a half centuries. The original Com- 
pany received its charter of incorporation from Elizabeth in 1600. 
Its political powers and the Constitution of the Indian government 
were derived from the Regulating Act of 1773, passed by the min- 
istry of Lord North. By that statute the governor of Bengal 
was raised to the rank of governor-general; and, in conjunction 
with his council of four members, he was intrusted with the duty 
of controlling the governments of Madras and Bombay, so far as 
regarded questions of peace and war; a supreme court of judica- 
ture was appointed at Calcutta, to which the judges were nomi- 
nated by the crown ; and a power of making rules and regulations 
was conferred upon the governor-general and his council. Next 
came the India Bill of Pitt (1784), which founded the board of 
control in England, strengthened the supremacy of Bengal over 
the other presidencies, and first authorized the historic phrase, 
" governor-general-in-council." 

The renewed charter of 1 813 abolished the Company's monopoly 
of Indian trade and compelled it to direct its energies to the good 
government of the people. The Act of 1833, at the next renewal 



644 English Historians 

of the Company's charter for another twenty years, did away with 
its remaining trade to China. It also introduced successive re- 
forms into the Constitution of the Indian government. It added 
to the council a new (legal) member, who need not be chosen from 
among the Company's servants, and who was at first entitled to be 
present only at the meetings for making laws and regulations; it. 
accorded the authority of acts of Parliament to the laws and regu- 
lations so made, subject to the disallowance of the court of direc- 
tors; it appointed a law commission; and it finally gave to the 
governor-general-in-council a control over the other presidencies, 
in all points relating to the civil or military administration. The 
charter of the Company was renewed for the last time in 1853, not 
for a definite period of years, but only for so long as Parliament 
should see fit. On this occasion the number of directors was 
reduced, and their patronage as regards appointments to the civil 
service was taken away, to make room for the principle of open 
competition. 

The Act for the Better Government of India (1858), which 
finally transferred the administration from the Company to the 
crown, was not passed without an eloquent protest from the direc- 
tors, nor without bitter party discussions in Parliament. It enacted 
that India shall be governed by, and in the name of, the Queen of 
England through one of her principal secretaries of state, assisted 
by a council of fifteen members. The governor-general received 
the new title of viceroy. The European troops of the company, 
numbering about 24,000 officers and men, were amalgamated 
with the royal service, and the Indian navy was abolished. 
By the Indian Councils Act (1861) the governor-general's council, 
and also the councils at Madras and Bombay, were augmented 
by the addition of non-official members, either natives or 
Europeans, for legislative purposes only; and, by another act 
passed in the same year, high courts of judicature were con- 
stituted out of the old supreme courts at the presidency 
towns. 



Bibliographical Note 

Innes, Lucknow and Oude in the Mutiny. Malleson, The Indian 
Mutiny of 1857. Kaye and Malleson, History of the Sepoy War and the 
Indian Mutiny (6 vols.). Shadwell, Life of Colin Campbell, Lord Clyde. 



CHAPTER III 

THE AUSTRALIAN CONSTITUTION 

In the constitutions of the various English-speaking colonies, 
which form a part of the British empire, one has an excellent 
opportunity to study the forms of government which Englishmen 
work out when free from the trammels of the historical traditions 
and economic conditions of the mother country. Feudal aristoc- 
racy, which originated largely in conquest and confiscation, as 
De Tocqueville long ago pointed out, has had no opportunity to 
reproduce itself in the colonies of modern times. As a result, that 
feature of the British Constitution is absent in the colonies as in the 
United States. The most interesting, perhaps, of all the constitu- 
tions formed under these new conditions is that which recently 
federated the Australian States into a Commonwealth. It is 
doubly interesting on account of the various problems of social 
reform and control which the Australian colonies are working out 
individually, and will doubtless continue to work out on a larger 
scale under the new Constitution. Fortunately we have from the 
pen of Mr. Bryce, whose book on the American Commonwealth 
has laid all Americans under a great debt, a brief description of the 
newly erected government. 

§ i. The Land and People of Australia i 

Before examining the provisions of the Constitution which is 
bringing the hitherto independent colonies into one political body, 
it is well to consider for a moment the territory and the inhabitants 
that are to be thus united. 

1 Bryce, Studies in History and Jurisprudence, pp. 403 ff. By permis- 
sion of the American Branch of the Oxford Press. 

645 



646 English Historians 

The total area of Australia is nearly 3,000,000 square miles, not 
much less than that of Europe. Of this a comparatively small 
part is peopled by white men; for the interior, as well as vast tracts 
stretching inland from the southwestern and northwestern coasts, 
is almost rainless, and supplies, even in its better districts, nothing 
more than a scanty growth of shrubs. Much of it is lower than the 
regions towards the coast, and parts are but little above sea-level. 
It has been hitherto deemed incapable of supporting human settle- 
ment, and unfit even for such ranching as is practised on arid 
tracts in Western North America and in South Africa. Modern 
science has brought so many unexpected things to pass, that this 
conclusion may prove to have been too hasty. Still no growth of 
population in the interior can be looked for corresponding to that 
which marked the development of the United States west of the 
Alleghanies in the beginning of the nineteenth century. 

Of the six Australian colonies, one, Tasmania, occupies an 
island of its own, fertile and beautiful, but rather smaller 
(26,000 square miles) than Scotland or South Carolina. It lies 
150 miles from the coast of Victoria. Western Australia 
covers an enormous area (nearly 1,000,000 square miles, between 
three and four times the size of Texas), and South Aus- 
tralia, which stretches right across the continent to the Gulf of 
Carpentaria, is almost as large (a little over 900,000 square miles). 
Queensland is smaller, with 668,000 square miles; New South 
Wales, on the other hand, has only 310,000 square miles (i.e. is 
rather larger than Norway and Sweden, and about the size of 
California, Oregon, and Washington put together) ; Victoria 
only 87,000 (i.e. is as large as Great Britain and a little larger than 
Idaho). The country (including Tasmania) stretches from north 
to south over 32 of latitude (n° S. to 43 S.), a wider range than 
that of the United States (lat. 49 N. to 26 N.). There are thus 
even greater contrasts of climate than in the last-named country, 
for though the Tasmanian winters are less cold than those of 
Montana, the tropical heats of North Queensland and the 
shores of the Gulf of Carpentaria exceed any temperature reached 
in Louisiana and Texas. Fortunately, Northern Australia is, for 
its latitude, comparatively free from malarial fevers. But it is 
too hot for the out-door labor of white men. In these marked 
physical differences between the extremities of the continent there 
lie sources whence may spring divergences not only of material 
interests, but ultimately even of character, — divergences compar- 
able to those which made the Gulf States of the American Union 



The Australian Constitution 647 

find themselves drawn apart from the States of the North Atlantic 
and Great Lakes. 

It must also be noted that the great central wilderness cuts off 
not only the tropical north and northwest, but also the more tem- 
perate parts of the west from the thickly peopled regions of the 
southwest. Western Australia communicates with her Eastern 
sisters only by a long sea voyage. She is almost in the position 
held by California when, before the making of the first transcon- 
tinental railway, people went from New York to San Francisco via 
Panama. Nor is there much prospect that settlements will arise 
here and there in the intervening desert. 

The population of the continent, which has now reached nearly 
4,000,000, is very unequally distributed. The three -colonies of 
widest area, Western Australia, South Australia, and Queensland, 
have none of them 500,000 inhabitants. Tasmania has about 
170,000. Two others, New South Wales and Victoria, have each 
more than 1,000,000. This disparity ranges them for political 
purposes into two groups, — the large ones with 2,500,000 people 
in two colonies, and the small ones with 1,500,000 in four colonies. 

Against these two sets of differences, physical and social, which 
might be expected to induce an opposition of economic and political 
interests, there is to be placed the fact that the Australian colonies 
are singularly homogeneous in population. British North America 
is peopled by a French as well as by an English race, British South 
Africa by a Dutch race as well as an English. But Australia is 
purely British. Even the Irish and the Scotch, though both races 
are specially prone to emigrate, seem less conspicuous than they 
are in Canada. Australia is to-day almost as purely English as 
Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Virginia were in 1776, and 
probably more English than were the thirteen original States taken 
as a whole. In this fact the colonies found not only an inducement 
to a closer union, but a security against the occurrence of one of the 
dangers which most frequently threatens the internal concord of 
a federation. Race antagonisms have troubled not only Canada 
and South Africa, but the United Kingdom itself, and they now 
constitute the gravest of the perils that surround the Austro-Hun- 
garian monarchy. 

Among the other favoring conditions may be enumerated the use 
of one language only (whereas in Canada and South Africa two 
are spoken), the existence of one system of law, the experience of 
the same form of political institutions, a form modelled on that 
which the venerable traditions of the mother country have endeared 



648 English Historians 

to Englishmen in all parts of the world. It has also been a piece of 
good fortune that religion has not interposed any grounds for jeal- 
ousy or division. The population of Australia is divided among 
various Christian denominations very much as the population of 
England is, and the chief difference between the old and the new 
country lies in the greater friendliness to one another of various 
communions which exists in the new country, a happy result due 
partly to the absence of any state establishment of religion, and 
partly to that sense of social equality which is strong enough to 
condemn any attempt on the part of one religious body to claim 
social superiority over the others. 

Finally, there is the unique position which Australia occupies. 
She has a perfect natural frontier, because she is surrounded by the 
sea, an island continent, so far removed from all other civilized 
nations that she is not likely to be either threatened by their attacks 
or entangled in their alliances. The United States had, when its 
career began, British possessions on the north, French and Spanish 
on the south. But the tropical islands which Holland, Germany, 
and France claim as theirs, to the north and east of the Australian 
coasts, are cut off by a wide stretch of ocean. They are not now, 
and are not likely at any time we can foresee, to contain a white 
population capable of disturbing the repose of Australia. Such a 
country seems made for one nation, though the fact that its settled 
regions lie scattered round a vast central wilderness suggests that 
it is better fitted for a federation than for a government of the uni- 
fied type. But, on the other hand, this very remoteness might, 
in removing the force of external pressure, have weakened the 
sense of need for a federal union had there not existed that homo- 
geneity of race and that aspiring national sentiment to which I 
have adverted. 

Compare these conditions with those of the three other federa- 
tions. The thirteen other colonies which have grown into the 
present forty-five States of the American Union lay continuous 
with one another along the coast of the Atlantic. England held 
Canada to the north of them, France held the Mississippi Valley to 
the west of them, and, still farther to the west, Spain held the 
coasts of the Pacific. They had at that time no natural boundaries 
on land ; and the forces that drew them together were local con- 
tiguity, race unity, and above all the sense that they must combine 
to protect themselves against powerful neighbors as well as against 
the evils which had become so painfully evident in the governments 
of the several States. Nature prescribed union, though few dreamt 



The Australian Constitution 649 

that Nature meant that union to cover the whole central belt of a 
continent. In the case of Canada, Nature spoke with a more doubt- 
ful voice. She might rather have appeared to suggest that this 
long and narrow strip of habitable but only partially inhabited 
land, stretching from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to Puget Sound, 
should either all of it unite with its mighty neighbor to the south, 
or should form three or four separate groups, separated by inter- 
vening wildernesses. Political feelings, however, compounded of 
attachment to Britain and a proud resolve not to be merged in a 
rival power which had done nothing /to conciliate them, led the 
Canadians to form a confederation of their own, which Nature has 
blessed in this point at least, that its territories are so similar in 
climate and in conditions for industrial growth that few economic 
antagonisms seem likely to arise among them. Switzerland, how- 
ever, is the most remarkable case of a federation formed by his- 
torical causes in the very teeth, as it might seem, of ethnological 
obstacles. Three races, speaking three languages, have been so 
squeezed together by formidable neighbors as to have grown into 
one. The help of Nature has however been given in providing 
them with mountain fastnesses from which the armies of those 
neighbors could be resisted; and the physical character of the 
country has joined with the traditions of a splendid warlike hero- 
ism in creating a patriotism perhaps more intense than any other 
in the modern world. 

§ 2. Position of the States in the Australian Federation 

The Australian Constitution, like that of the United States, 
assumes the States to be already organized communities, and 
contains nothing regarding their constitutions. The case of 
Canada was different, because there the previous government of 
the Upper and Lower Provinces, which had been one, had to be 
cut in two, and arrangements made for duly constituting the two 
halves. But in the case of Australia, the preexisting constitutions 
of the colonies, granted by the imperial government at various 
times, go on unchanged, subject only to the supersession of some of 
their functions by the Commonwealth, and to one or two specifi- 
cally mentioned restrictions. That these restrictions are com- 
paratively few may be partly ascribed to that aversion which the 
English everywhere show to this kind of safeguard against the 
misuse of legislature power. The omnipotence of the British 
Parliament seems to have fostered the notion that all Parliaments 



650 English Historians 

ought to be free to do wrong as well as to do right. The only 
things from which a State is disabled are the keeping of a naval or 
military force (except with the consent of the commonwealth 
Parliament), coining money, and making anything but gold and. 
silver coin legal tender. A State is not, as are the American States, 
forbidden to grant titles of nobility, or to pass any ex post facto 
law or law "impairing the obligation of contracts." That no such 
prohibitions exist in Canada may be ascribed to the fact that in 
Canada the national or Dominion government has the right of 
vetoing laws passed by provincial legislatures, so that improper 
legislation can be in this way checked. The power is not often 
exercised in Canada, but when exercised has sometimes led to 
friction. This plan, however, is neither so respectful to the Prov- 
inces nor so conformable to general principles as is the American 
plan, which leaves the States subject only to the restrictions imposed 
by the Constitution — restrictions which ipso hire annul a law at- 
tempting to transgress them. And the Australians have wisely 
followed the American rather than the Canadian precedent. 
The Australians have, to be sure, in reserve a power to which 
nothing similar exists in America, viz., the right of the British 
crown at home to veto legislation. Rarely as this right is put in 
force it might conceivably be used at the instance of the national 
government to avert an undesirable conflict between state statutes 
and national statutes. Note further that each Australian State 
is left as free to amend its own Constitution as it was before, sub- 
ject of course to the veto of the British crown, but to no interference 
by the Commonwealth ; whereas in Canada acts of the provincial 
legislatures amending their constitutions are subject to the veto of 
the Dominion government as representing the crown. 

The omission of any provision similar to the famous and 
much litigated clause which debars an American state legislature 
from passing any law impairing the obligation of contracts is 
especially noteworthy. That clause, introduced by the Philadel- 
phia Convention in order to check the tendency of some reckless 
States to get rid of their debts, produced in course of time unexpect- 
edly far-reaching results, from some of which American legis- 
latures and courts have made ingenious attempts to escape. It has 
indeed been thought that several subsequent decisions of the su- 
preme court are not easily reconcilable with the famous judgment 
in the Dartmouth College Case (a.d. 1818), in which the full effect 
of this clause was for the first time displayed. That effect has been 
to fetter legislation in ways which are found so inconvenient in 



The Australian Constitution 651 

practice that they are acquiesced in only because many state 
legislatures are in the United States objects of popular distrust. 
No corresponding distrust seems to be felt in the British colonies, 
and therefore the Australians have not deemed any such prohibition 
needful, following the example of the British House of Commons, 
which in 1893 rejected a similar clause when moved as an amend- 
ment to the Irish Home Rule Bill of that year. 

In another point the Australian States have been treated with 
respect. In each of them the nominal executive head has hitherto 
been a governor appointed by the British crown. This was the 
case in Canada prior to 1867 ; but when the Canadian federation 
was formed, the appointment of the governors of the several 
provinces was intrusted to the governor-general of the Dominion, 
that is to say, to the Dominion Cabinet by whose advice the 
governor-general, being a sort of constitutional monarch, is guided. 
In practice, therefore, these governorships have become rewards 
bestowed upon leading party politicians. The Australians wisely 
(as most Englishmen will think) avoided this plan. Neither did 
they adopt the American method of letting the people of each 
State elect the governor, a method unsuited to government on the 
Cabinet system, because, as the state governor is under that system 
only a nominal head of the executive (the Cabinet being the real 
executive), there was no good reason for setting the people to 
choose him, and good reasons against doing so, inasmuch as popu- 
lar elections are invariably fought on party lines. Accordingly 
the Australians have preferred to let him continue to be appointed 
by the home government, and to allow him to communicate 
directly with the colonial office in London. His ministers are 
indeed described in the Constitution (sect. 44) as being "the 
Queen's ministers." 

Four other remarkable divergences, from both the American and 
the Canadian federal systems, remain to be mentioned. 

One relates to the judiciary. In the United States there is a 
complete system of federal courts ramifying all over the Union 
and exercising exclusive jurisdiction in all cases arising under 
federal statutes, as well as in a number of other matters specified 
in Art III, sect. 2 of the Constitution. But the State courts remain 
quite independent in all State matters, and determine the inter- 
pretation of the State constitutions and of all State statutes, nor 
does any appeal lie from them to the federal courts. In Canada 
this was not thought necessary, so there the same set of courts 
deal with all questions arising under federal statutes and with 



652 English Historians 

those arising under provincial statutes, and the supreme court of 
Canada receives appeals from all other courts. This is less con- 
formable to theory than the United States plan, but does not seem 
to have worked ill. The danger that courts sitting in the Prov- 
inces would, under the influence of local feeling, pervert federal 
law, was not serious in Canada (though a similar danger was feared 
in the United States in 1787), and indeed all the Canadian judges 
are appointed by the dominion government, a further illustration 
of the preponderance which the nation has over the Provinces. 
The Australians have taken a middle course. They have estab- 
lished a federal supreme court, to be called "the high court of 
Australia," and have taken power for their Parliament to create 
other federal courts. So far, they follow the United States prece- 
dent. But they have given power to the commonwealth Par- 
liament to invest state courts with federal jurisdiction, thereby 
allowing those courts to be, as in Canada, both state and federal. 
And they have also allowed an appeal from all state courts to the 
federal high court. By this plan the States are more directly 
connected with and subordinate to the national government than 
they are in the United States. The Australian scheme has one 
great incidental advantage. In the United States the law of 
different States may and does differ, not only in respect of the dif- 
ference between the statutes of one and the statutes of another, 
but also in respect of questions of common law untouched by 
statutes. The supreme court of Massachusetts may, for instance, 
take a different view of what constitutes fraud at common law 
from that taken by the supreme court of Pennsylvania, and there is 
no court of appeal above these courts to bring their views into 
accord. This has not happened to any great extent in Australia, 
because the British Privy Council has entertained appeals from all 
its courts, and it will happen still less in future, because the federal 
high court will be close at hand to settle questions on which the 
courts of different States may have been in discord. 

A second point shows how much less powerful the sentiment of 
state sovereignty has been in Australia than it was in the United 
States. By an amendment (XI) to the American Constitution 
made in 1798 it is expressly declared that no State can be sued 
by a private plaintiff. But Australia expressly grants jurisdic- 
tion in such cases to its federal high court (sect. 75). 

A third point is the curious and novel power given to a State of 
referring matters to the commonwealth Parliament, and to that 
Parliament of thereupon legislating on such matters (sect. 51, 



The Australian Constitution 653 

XXXVII). Under this provision (which is not to be found in 
the Canadian Constitution) there is no department of state law 
wherewith the national legislature may not be rendered competent 
to deal. It may be usefully employed to secure uniformity of 
legislation over all Australia on a number of subjects not within 
the specifically allotted field of the commonwealth Parliament. 

Finally, the commonwealth Parliament may grant financial 
assistance to any State, and may take over the whole or a part of 
its debts as existing at the establishment of the Commonwealth. 
Provisions such as these imply, or will involve if put in practice, 
a relation between the national government and the States closer 
than that which exists in America. 

To complete this account of the relation of the nation to the 
States, let it be noted that the State may surrender any part of its 
territory to the Commonwealth, and that the Commonwealth is 
bound to protect each State against invasion or, on the application 
of the executive of the State, against domestic violence. This 
latter provision is drawn from the United States Constitution, 
though in America it is from the state legislature, if then in session, 
that the application for protection ought to come. Australia is 
right in her variation, because in her States the legislature acts 
through the executive. Neither provision occurs in the Constitu- 
tion of Canada, which assigns military and naval defence exclu- 
sively to the Dominion government, and makes itself responsible 
for the maintenance of order everywhere. In Switzerland the 
management of the army, in which all citizens are bound to serve, 
is divided between cantons and confederation, the supreme control 
remaining with the latter (Artt. 18-22). The confederation is 
bound to protect a canton against invasion and disorders, and may 
even itself intervene if the executive of the canton cannot ask it on 
its own motion (Artt. 16 and 17). Australia, as we have seen, 
allows the States to maintain a force with the consent of the Com- 
monwealth; and this is permitted by the American Constitution 
also. 

§ 3. The Legislature in the Australian Commonwealth 

We may now pass on to consider the national government, the 
construction whereof occupies by far the greater part of the Con- 
stitution, which, while it left the States pretty much as they were, 
had here to build up a new system from the ground. 

The first point to be examined relates to the limitations imposed 



654 English Historians 

on the national government as against the citizens generally, since 
I have already dealt with the limitations on its powers as against 
the States. Here a remarkable divergence from the American 
Constitution is disclosed. When that instrument was enacted, 
the keenest suspicion and jealousy was felt of the action of the 
government to be established under it. It was feared that Con- 
gress might become an illiberal oligarchy and the President a new 
George III. Accordingly great pains were taken to debar Congress 
from doing anything which could infringe the primordial human 
rights of the citizen. Some restrictions are contained in the original 
Constitution; others fill the first nine amendments which were 
passed two or three years later, as a part of the arrangements by 
which the acceptance of the Constitution was secured. And down 
till our own time every state constitution in America has continued 
to contain a similar "Bill of Rights" for the protection of the 
citizens against abuse of legislative power. The English, however, 
have completely forgotten these old suspicions which, when they 
did exist, attached to the crown and not to the legislature. So 
when Englishmen in Canada or Australia enact new constitutions, 
they take no heed of such matters, and make their legislature as like 
the omnipotent Parliament of Britain as they can. The Canadian 
Constitution leaves the dominion Parliament unfettered save by 
the direction (sect. 54) that money shall not be appropriated to any 
purpose that has not been recommended to the House of Commons 
by the executive, a direction embodying English practice, and now 
adopted by Australia also. And the Australian Constitution 
contains but one provision which recalls the old-fashioned Bill of 
Rights, viz., that which forbids the Commonwealth to "make any 
law for establishing any religion or for imposing any religious ob- 
servance or for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion." The 
Swiss Constitution, influenced by French and American models, 
is in this respect more archaic, for it imposes a series of disabilities 
on its legislature in the interest of individual freedom (sectt. 39, 49, 
54-59). This diversity of attitude between the English on the one 
hand and both the Americans and the Swiss on the other is a 
curious instance of the way in which usage and tradition mould a 
nation's mind. Parliament was for so long a time the protector 
of Englishmen against an arbitrary executive that they did not 
form the habit of taking precautions against the abuse of the powers 
of the legislature ; and their struggles for a fuller freedom took the 
form of making Parliament a more truly popular and representative 
body, not that of restricting its authority. 



The Australian Constitution 6$$ 

The point just examined is one which arises in all rigid consti- 
tutions, whether federal or unitary. But the next point is one 
with which only federations are concerned ; and it is one in which 
all the great federations agree. All have adopted the same method 
of providing both for the predominance of the majority of the 
people considered as one nation, and for the maintenance of the 
rights of the States considered as distinct communities. The 
Americans invented this method; the Swiss, the Canadians, the 
Germans, and now the Australians have imitated them. This 
method is to divide the legislature into two houses, using one to 
represent the whole people on the basis of numbers, and using 
the other to represent the several States on the basis (except in 
Germany) of their equality as autonomous communities. It was 
this device that made federation possible in the United States, 
for the smaller States would not have foregone their independence 
in reliance upon any weaker guarantee. 

The Australian scheme provides (sectt. 7-23) for an Upper 
House or Senate of thirty-six members, six from each State, and 
a House of Representatives (sectt. 24-40) of seventy-five members, 
elected on a. basis of population, so that forty-nine members will 
come from the two large States, New South Wales and Victoria, — 
and twenty-six from the four small States. No original State is ever 
to have less than five. 

The equal representation of the six original States is always to be 
maintained, but the number of senators may be increased, and 
when new States come to be formed, the Parliament may allot to 
them such number of senators as it thinks fit. Senators sit for 
six years, and do not all retire at the same time. These features 
are taken from the Constitution of the United States, which, as 
already observed, has been a model for subsequent federal upper 
houses. But there are remarkable variations in the Australian 
scheme. 

1. In the United States each newly created State receives as a 
matter of right its two senators. In Australia the Commonwealth 
may allot such number as it thinks fit. 

2. In the United States one-third of the Senate retires every 
two years. In Australia one-half retires every three years. 

3. In the United States the president of the Senate is the Vice- 
President of the United States, chosen by the people. In Aus- 
tralia, the Senate is to choose its own President. 

4. In the United States the quorum is one more than a half 
of the total number; in Australia one-third of the total number. 



6$6 English Historians 

5. In the United States the legislatures of the several States 
elect the senators. In Australia the senators are elected by the 
people of the State. 

This last point is one of great interest. Tocqueville, writing in 
1832, attributed (erroneously, as the sequel has shown) the excel- 
lence of the American Senate to the method of election by the 
state legislatures. Since his days the American Senate has declined, 
and so far from this mode of election having tended to sustain its 
character, the general, though not unanimous, opinion of the wise 
in America deems the Senate to be injured by it, and desires a 
change to the method of election by direct popular vote. It was 
partly because the Australian convention had become aware of this 
tendency of American opinion that they rejected the existing Amer- 
ican plan ; nor is it impossible that the Americans themselves may 
alter their system, which gives greater opportunities for intrigue 
and the use of money than popular election would be likely to 
afford. In Australia, the senators are in the first instance to be 
elected by the people, each State voting as one electorate, but this 
may be altered (e.g. to a system of district elections) by the Parlia- 
ment of the Commonwealth, or failing its action, by the Parliament 
of a State. It will be interesting to see what experiments are tried 
and how they work. District voting may give different results 
from a general state vote, and a party for the moment dominant 
may choose the plan that best suits it. 

6. In the United States the Senate is an undying body, perpetu- 
ally renewed by fresh elections, never losing more than one-third 
of its members at any one time. In Australia the Senate may be 
dissolved in case a deadlock should arise between it and the House 
of Representatives. 

The Senate is the sheet-anchor of the four small States. Com- 
manding a majority in it, they have consented to acquiesce in the 
great preponderance which their two larger neighbors possess in 
the House of Representatives. The numbers of the latter House 
are to be always as nearly as practicable double those of the Senate, 
a point whose importance will presently appear. 

The House is to continue for three years (subject, of course, to 
dissolution), a term intermediate, though inclining in the demo- 
cratic direction, between the two years of the American Congress 
and the seven (practically six) years of the British House of Com- 
mons. The Canadian term is five years. Until the common- 
wealth Parliament otherwise provides, the electoral suffrage is to 
be (as in the United States) the suffrage prescribed by state law 



The Australian Constitution 657 

for the election of members of the more numerous state house, 
and it is expressly provided, doubtless with a view to the fact that 
women's suffrage already exists in two colonies, that no law shall 
prevent a state voter from voting at commonwealth elections. 
So far from securing, as does the United States Constitution, that 
no person shall be excluded on the ground of race from the suffrage, 
Australia has expressly provided that persons belonging to a par- 
ticular race may be excluded, for she declares (sect. 25) that in 
such cases the excluded race is not to be reckoned among the popu- 
lation of the State for the purposes of an allotment of represen- 
tatives. Plural voting is forbidden. The quorum of members is 
a mean between the inconveniently large quorum (one-half) of the 
American, and the very small one (forty) of the British House. 
The seat of any senator or member of the House becomes ipso 
facto vacant if he fails (without permission) to attend any session 
for two continuous months. No person having any pecuniary 
interest in any agreement with the public service (except as mem- 
ber of an incorporated company of at least twenty-five persons), or 
holding any office of profit under the crown, can sit in either 
house, unless he be a minister either of the Commonwealth or of 
a State. The exception is noteworthy, not only because it is 
framed with a view to the establishment of Cabinet government, 
but also because it implies that a man may, contrary to American 
and Canadian usage, be at the same time both an executive official 
of a State and also a member of the federal legislature. It 
would appear that women are eligible to membership of either 
house. Every senator and representative is to receive a salary, 
fixed for the present at £400 ($2000) a year. 

§ 4. The Federal Executive 

The executive is to consist of the governor-general and the min- 
isters. To the great convenience of the Australian people, the 
head of the executive does not need to be elected either by popular 
vote (as in the United States) or by the Chambers, as in France and 
Switzerland. He is nominated by the British crown, and holds 
office so long as the crown pleases, receiving a salary fixed, for the 
present at £10,000 ($50,000) a year (exactly the salary of the Ameri- 
can President). He has an executive council, modelled on the 
British Privy Council (though the name Privy Council is not used 
as it is in the Canadian Constitution), and from it he chooses a 
number of ministers (fixed for the present at seven), who are to 
2 u 



658 English Historians 

administer the several departments of the public service. They 
must be members of one or other House of Parliament — a 
remarkable provision, for though this is a British practice, that 
practice has never been embodied in any positive rule. As the 
governor-general is only a constitutional figurehead, these ministers 
will in fact constitute the ruling executive of the Commonwealth. 

§ 5. The Federal High Court 

The judiciary is to consist in the first instance of a federal high 
court (containing a chief justice and at least two other judges) 
capable of exercising both original jurisdiction in certain sets of 
cases, and also appellate jurisdiction not only from single federal 
judges and inferior federal courts, but also from the supreme courts 
of the States. Power is taken both to establish lower federal courts 
and to invest state courts with federal jurisdiction. But besides this 
judiciary proper, there is created a second court for dealing with 
cases relating to trade and commerce, under the name of the 
Inter-State Commission (sect. 101). This remarkable and very 
important institution has doubtless been suggested by the United 
States Inter-State Commerce Commission created by Congress some 
eighteen years ago in order to deal with railway and water traffic 
between the States. Its functions will be half-administrative, half- 
judicial, and in questions of pure law an appeal will lie from it to 
the high court, while a guarantee for its independence is found in the 
clause which declares that its members shall not be removed during 
their seven years' term of office. All federal judges are to be 
appointed by the governor-general, that is to say, by the executive 
ministry. All trials (on indictment) for any offence against the 
laws of the Commonwealth shall be by jury, and held in the State 
where the alleged offence was committed. The judicial establish- 
ments of the States remain unaffected, and the judges thereof 
will continue to be appointed by the state executives. 

In determining the functions of the high court there arose an 
important question which seemed for a moment to threaten the 
whole scheme of federation. The draft constitution, which the 
convention had prepared and which the people had approved 
by their vote, provided that questions arising on the interpretation 
of the Constitution as to the respective limits of the powers of the 
Commonwealth and of the States, or as to the respective limits of 
the constitutional powers of any two or more States, should be 
adjudicated upon by the high court of the Commonwealth, and 



The Australian Constitution 659 

that no appeal should lie from its decision to the Queen in council 
(i.e. to the judicial committee of the Privy Council in England, 
which is the Supreme Court of Appeal from the British colonies and 
India), "unless the public interests of some part of her Majesty's 
dominions, other than the Commonwealth or a State, are involved." 
When the draft reached England to be embodied in a bill, the 
British government took exception to this provision as tending to 
weaken the tie between the mother country and the colonies. 
There were many in England who thought that it was not in the 
interest of Australia herself that she should lose, in questions 
which might involve political feeling and be complicated with party 
issues, the benefit of having a determination of such questions by an 
authority absolutely impartial and unconnected with her domestic 
interests and passions. How much better (they argued) would it 
have been for the United States at some critical moments could 
they have had constitutional disputes adjudicated on by a tribunal 
above all suspicion of sectional or party bias, since it would have 
represented the pure essence of legal wisdom, an unimpeachable 
devotion to legal truth ! 

To this the Australians replied that the experience of the United 
States had shown that in constitutional questions it was sometimes 
right and necessary to have regard to the actual conditions and 
needs of the nation; that constitutional questions were in so far 
political that where legal considerations were nearly balanced, the 
view ought to be preferred which an enlightened regard for the 
welfare of the nation suggested ; that a court sitting in England 
and knowing little of Australia would be unable to appreciate all 
the bearings of a constitutional question, and might, in taking a 
purely technical and possibly too literal a view of the Constitution, 
give to the Constitution a rigidity which would check its legitimate 
expansion and aggravate internal strife. Australia must — so they 
pursued — be mistress of her own destinies, and as it is she that had 
framed and procured the enactment of this Constitution, so by her 
ought the responsibility to be borne of working it on its judicial as 
well as its executive and legislative side. Not only was this better 
for Australia herself, but it would be more conducive to the main- 
tenance of the connection between the Commonwealth and the 
mother country. 

After some wavering, the British government, perceiving the 
risk of offending Australian sentiment, gave way. They dropped 
in committee of the House of Commons the alteration which they 
had introduced into the Australian draft, substituting for it an 



660 English Historians 

amendment which, while slightly varying the original terms of the 
draft, practically conceded the point for which the Australian 
delegates, sent to England to assist in passing the measure, had 
contended. The act as passed provides that no appeal shall lie 
to the crown in council upon the constitutional questions above- 
mentioned unless the high court itself shall, being satisfied that the 
question is one which ought to be determined by the Privy Council, 
certifv to that effect. In all other such cases its judgment will be 
final. 

Appeals to the Privy Council in questions other than consti- 
tutional will continue to lie from the supreme courts of the States 
(with the alternative of an appeal to the high court) and from the high 
court itself, when special leave is given by the Privy Council. The 
commonwealth Parliament may limit the matters in which such 
leave may be asked, but the laws imposing such limitations are 
to be reserved for the pleasure of the crown. 

The scheme of judicature above outlined follows in the main the 
model contained in the American Constitution. It does not draw 
the line between state and federal matters and courts so sharply, 
for appeals are to lie from state courts in all matters alike, and 
state courts may receive jurisdiction in federal matters. On 
the other hand, it is more comformable to principle than either the 
Canadian plan, which provides no federal courts save the supreme 
court and gives the appointment of all judges alike to the Dominion 
government, or the Swiss plan, which refers questions of conflict 
between the nation and the cantons, or as to the constitutionality 
of federal laws, not to the judiciary at all, but to the federal legis- 
lature. Broadly speaking, the Australian high court will have to 
fill such a place and discharge such functions as have been filled 
and discharged in America by that exalted tribunal which Chief 
Justice John Marshall and other great legal luminaries have made 
illustrious. In working out the provisions of the Constitution by 
an expansive interpretation, cautious but large-minded, it may 
render to Australia services not unworthy to be compared with 
those which America has gratefully recognized. 

Now let us see how this frame of government, which I have 
briefly outlined in its salient features, is intended to work. 

Its essence lies in a matter which is not indicated by any express 
provision, the dependence of the executive upon the legislature. 
Herein it differs fundamentally from the American and Swiss 
systems. It reproduces the English system of what is called 
Cabinet or responsible government ; that is to say, a government 



The Australian Constitution 66 1 

in which the executive instead of being, as in America, an indepen- 
dent authority, directly created by the people and amenable to the 
people only, is created by and responsible to the legislature. As and 
when the British colonies respectively obtained self-governing 
institutions, each of them adopted this scheme, since it was the 
one familiar to them at home ; and to it they seem all determined 
to adhere. 

Its distinctive features are these: — 

The nominal head of the executive, in Britain the crown, in 
Australia the governor-general as representing the crown, is 
permanent, and is not responsible to the legislature, because he 
acts not on his own views, but upon the advice of his ministers. 

The ministers are responsible to the legislature which virtually 
chooses them, and they depend upon its confidence for their con- 
tinuance in office. 

The ministers are, however, not wholly at the mercy of the legis- 
lature, because they may dissolve it, that is to say, may appeal to 
the people, in the hope that the people will elect a new legislature 
which will support them. This kind of government accordingly 
rests on a balance of three authorities, — the executive, the legislature, 
and the people, the people being a sort of arbiter between ministry 
and Parliament. As the ministry can at any moment appeal to the 
people, the threat of appealing puts pressure upon the Parliament, 
and keeps a majority cohesive. In the existence of this power of 
sudden dissolution there lies a marked difference from the Ameri- 
can scheme, which some one has called astronomical, because 
the four years' term of office of the executive and the two years' 
term of the legislature are both fixed by the earth's course round the 
sun. 

I have spoken of the legislature as the authority to which the 
ministry is responsible. But what is the legislature ? In England, 
although Parliament consists of two houses, the minister-making 
power resides solely in the House of Commons. Being elective, 
the House of Commons has behind it the moral weight of the people 
and the prestige of many victories. Being the holder of the purse, 
it has the legal machinery for giving effect to its will, since without 
supplies administration cannot be carried on. Accordingly, 
though the existence of two often discordant houses may arrest 
or modify legislation in Britain, it does not affect the executive 
conduct of affairs, save on the rare occasions when immediate 
legislation is deemed indispensable by the executive. The same 
remark applies to Canada. There also one finds two houses, but 



662 English Historians 

the Senate, being a nominated and not a representative body, holds 
an entirely secondary place. The ministry may disregard a vote 
of want of confidence passed by it, just as in England they disregard 
an adverse vote of the House of Lords. In Australia, however, 
things will be quite different. There the Senate has been con- 
stituted as a representative body, elected by the peoples of the 
States ; and as the protector of the rights and interests of the States 
it holds functions of the highest importance. Its powers (save in 
one point to be presently mentioned) are the same as those of the 
House. In whom, then, does the power of making and unmaking 
ministries reside? Wherever one finds two assemblies, one finds 
them naturally tending to differ; and this will be particularly 
likely to occur where, as in Australia, they are constructed by 
different modes of election. Suppose a vote of no confidence in a 
particular ministry is carried in one house and followed by a vote 
of confidence passed in the other. Is the ministry to resign be- 
cause one house will not support it? It retains the confidence 
of the other; and if it does resign, and a new ministry comes in, 
the house which supported it may pass a vote of no confidence in 
those who have succeeded it. 

The problem is one which cannot arise either under the English 
or under the American system. Not under the English, because 
the two houses are not coordinate, the House of Commons being 
much the stronger. Not under the American, because, although 
the houses are coordinate, neither house has the power of dis- 
placing the President or his ministers. It is therefore a new prob- 
lem, and one which directly results from the attempt to combine 
features of both schemes, the Cabinet system of England and the 
coordinate Senate, strong because it represents the States, which 
a federal system prescribes. 

Bibliographical Note 

Jenks, History of the Australasian Colonies. Turner, A History of the 
Colony of Victoria. Beach, The Australian Federal Constitution, in the 
Political Science Quarterly, Vol. XIV, pp. 663 flf. 



INDEX 



^Ethelbert, of Kent, extent of his empire, 
13; accepts Christianity, 15. 

Aids, 77. 

Alfred the Great, state of England during 
his reign, 30 ff. ; seeks learned men, 
31; Asser in his service, 32; develop- 
ment of English prose under, 33 ; and 
the Chronicle, 35. 

Anglo-Saxon Conquest, importance of 
exaggerated, 1 ; theories of, 2 ; argu- 
ment for Teutonic theory of, 3 ; process 
of, 8; results of, 10; completion of, 12. 

Anglo-Saxons, contrasted with Franks, 
7 ; civilization of, 10 ; contests among, 
12 ff. ; conversion of, 13 ff. 

Ashley, on the mediaeval gilds, 169 ff. 

Asser, invited by Alfred to Wessex, 32; 
labors at Alfred's court, 33. 

Augustine, landing in England, 13-14. 

Australia, land and people of, 645 ff. ; 
position of the state in Constitution of, 
649 ff. ; federal legislature in, 653 ff . ; 
federal executive in, 657; the federal 
high court of, 658 ff. 

Baeda, his life, 23, 24; work, 24, 25; 
Alfred's translations, 36. 

Bagehot, on the Cabinet, 594 ff. 

Becket, as archbishop, 96 ff. ; first dis- 
pute with Henry II, 98; and the 
Church-State dispute, 99 ; and the Con- 
stitutions of Clarendon, 99, 101 ; flight 
of, 101 ; return to England and death, 
106 ff. 

Bengal, British in, 447. 

Berlin Decree, 528. 

Bible, Wycliffe and the, 230; Puritanism 
and the, 321. 

Bishops, dioceses of, created, 21 ; pri- 
macy of Canterbury, 22 ; election of, 
206. 



Boroughs, see Towns. 

Britain, Roman villa in, 3 ; contrasted 

with Gaul, 6; effects of Roman rule 

on, 7-9. 
Britons, contest with German invaders, 

3-8 ; contrasted with Gauls, 7. 
Bryce, on the Australian Constitution, 

645 ^ 

Cabinet, prime minister in, 594; princi- 
pal features of, 596; compared with 
presidential system, 598; relation to 
political education of the nation, 600; 
relation to the press, 602 ; compared 
with weakness of presidential system, 
602 ff. 

Calcutta, Black Hole of, 447. 

Calvinism, contrasted with Lutheranism, 
308; and Puritanism, 325. 

Canada, relative strength of French in, 
452; Montcalm in, 453; Pitt's scheme 
for the conquest of, 456; arrival of 
Wolfe in, 457 ; Wolfe's campaign in, 

459- 
Capitalists, rise of, 513; philosophy of, 

515, 614. 

Catholics, on the Continent in the six- 
teenth century, 310; James I and, 335; 
disabilities 01,399 ff. ; James II and, 
406 ff . ; relation of, to colonization, 426. 

Charles I, signs Petition of Right, 347; 
contest with Parliament, 347 ff. ; dis- 
solution of Parliament in 1629, 353; 
and the Declaration of Sports, 362; 
personal government of, 364; breaks 
with the Long Parliament, 371 ; trial 
and condemnation of, 373 ff . ; char- 
acter of, 375 ff. 

Christianity, in Britain, 8, 9; introduc- 
tion into England, 12, 15; conversion 
of Northumberland, 15 ; work of the 



663 



66+ 



Index 



Irish missionaries, 17, 18; see Refor- 
mation, Puritanism, and Catholics. 

Chronicle, the Old English, origin of, 
35; Swithun's work on, 36; expan- 
sion of, under Alfred, 36. 

Church, organization by Theodore, 21 ff. ; 
controversy over powers of, under 
Henry II, 99 ff . ; in the Middle Ages, 
204 ff . ; as an organization, 205; elec- 
tion of bishops, 206; and the pope, 
208 ; convocations, 212 ; legislation 
relating to, 214; jurisdiction of, 216; 
and Wycliffe, 221 ff. ; decline of power, 
246 ff. ; in the fifteenth century, 247 ; 
Froude's view of, in sixteenth century, 
248 ff. ; Henry VII and, 249. 

Church, The Anglican, the Elizabethan 
establishment, 295 ff. ; and Laud, 
355 ff. ; see Puritanism ; monopoly of 
offices by members of, 399 ff. ; and 
non-conformists, 402; and contest 
with James II, 404 ff. 

Church, Roman, missionaries sent to 
England by, 13 ; triumph of, at 
Whitby, 20, 21 ; Theodore sent to 
England by, 21; Cnut's visit to, 44; 
sanctions Norman Conquest, 61 ; its 
jurisdiction, 204; temporal superior- 
ity of, 206 ; relation of, to ecclesiastical 
appointments, 208 ; English legisla- 
tion against, 211 ; Wycliffe's attitude 
toward, 229 ; English view of, in the 
sixteenth century, 251; Parliament 
and the breach with, 255 ff. ; Cran- 
mer and, 281 ff . ; Elizabethan 
break with, 297 ff . ; reform of, 313 ; 
the Council of Trent and, 314 ; char- 
acter of, after 1564,317; James II and, 
404 ff. 

Clarendon, Constitutions of, 99 ff. ; 
Assize of, 102. 

Clarke, on labor politics, 608 ff. 

Classes, earls and barons, 78 ff. ; knights, 
80 ff. ; the unfree, 81 ff. ; industrial, 
513 ; see Labor. 

Clergy, see Church. 

Cnut, secures the throne, 38,39; destroys 
rivals, 39; character of his rule, 41, 
44; his military system, 42; favors 
the Church, 43; journey to Rome, 44, 
letter to his people, 44. 



Cobdenism, 614 ff. 

Colonization, advance of, 424; advan- 
tages of, 424; political aims in, 425; 
religious motive in, 427 ff. ; as a source 
of gain, 430; and settlement, 430. 

Continental System, The, 520 ff. ; origin 
of, 520-523 ; theory of, 523 ; English 
argument for, 525 ; Napoleon and, 
527 ff. ; development of, 528 ff. ; 
economic justification for English 
view of, 532; evasion of, 535. 

Corbett, on Drake, 434 ff. 

County, representation in Parliament, 128. 

Cranmer, Thomas, appeal to a general 
council, 281 ff. ; his degradation, 283 ; 
first recantation, 284; renewed sub- 
missions, 286; preparations for humili- 
ation of, 287 ; the real recantation, 288 ; 
the sixth confession, 289 ; the seventh 
recantation, 290; the last day of, 291 ff. 

Cromwell, Oliver, and the death warrant 
of Charles I, 374; his dissolution of 
the Long Parliament, 381 ff. ; criticism 
of his action, 387 ; Guizot's view of, 

389. 

Cromwell, Thomas, the King's chief 
secretary, 264; as vicar general, 265; 
and Fisher, 267 ; and the monasteries, 
269 ff. 

Cunningham, on motives for coloniza- 
tion, 423 ff. ; on the industrial revolu- 
tion, 505 ff. 



Danes, their havoc in England, 30 ff. ; 

renewed attempts of, 38 ; victory of, 

under Cnut, 38. 
Declaration of Right, formulated, 417 ff. 
Dispensing power, 156; exercise by 

James II, 404 ff. 
Disraeli, in opposition to Gladstone, 566; 

as Chancellor of the Exchequer, 572; 

introduces Parliamentary reform, 573; 

triumph of, 574. 
Dissent, see Nonconformists. 
Dixon, on the breach with Rome and 

Elizabethan settlement, 255 ff., 295 ff. 
Drake, Sir Francis, his circumnavigation 

of the globe, 434 ff. ; raids Spanish ship- 
ping, 434 ff. ; sails northward, 440; 

crosses the Pacific, 440 ff. 



Ind 



ex 



665 



Earls and barons, legal position of, 78 ff. 
Egbert, at Charlemagne's court, 27 ; 

supremacy over England, 28. 
Elizabeth, first Parliament of, 295 ; and 

English insularity, 307; religious 

policy, 325. 
Erasmus, writes Praise of Folly, 231. 
Escheat, jj. 

Feudalism, not retrogression, 4, 5; ele- 
ments of, 74 ff. ; and military system, 
74; and land tenure, 74; legal inci- 
dents of, 76; abolition of incidents of, 
396. 

Fisher, trial and execution of, 267. 

France, commercial rivalry with England, 
520 ff. 

Franks and Anglo-Saxons contrasted, 7. 

Freeholder, 159; see Manor. 

Freeman, on the Witenagemot, 48 ff . ; 
on Norman Conquest, 61 ff. 

Froude, on the eve of the Reformation, 
246 ff. 

Gairdner, on the Church after the breach 
with Rome, 264 ff. 

Gardiner, on the Parliamentary crisis of 
1629, 347 ff. ; on Laud, 355 ff. ; on the 
Long Parliament, 364 ff. ; on the Puri- 
tan Revolution, 373 ff. 

Gasquet, on the origin of the doctrinal 
revolt, 274 ffr 

Gaul, and Britain contrasted, 6. 

George III, personal government of, 492 
ff. ; uses his friends, 493 ; relations to 
Chatham, 494 ; government through 
Lord North, 496 ff. ; failure of his per- 
sonal government, 498 ; protest against 
his intervention, 500. 

Gild, Craft, character of, 175 ; relation to 
Merchant Gild, 176 ff. ; earlv gilds, 
177; growth of, 180; struggle for privi- 
leges, 179 ; internal organization of, 
181. 

Gild, Merchant, character of, 171; origin 
of, 171 ff . ; membership in, 172 ; regula- 
tions of, 174; relation to Craft Gild, 

175- 
Gladstone introduces Reform Bill, 567; 
debates with Lowe, 569 ; amends Dis- 



raeli's measure, 573 ; introduces new 
reform bill in 1884, 583 ; and the House 
of Lords, 587 ; writes to Lord Tennyson, 
587 ; correspondence of, with the Queen, 
589; negotiates with opposition, 592. 

Green, J. R., on adoption of Christianity 
and unification of England, 12 ff. ; on 
Alfred, 30 ff. ; on Puritanism, 321 ff. 

Green, Mrs. J. R., on town life in the 
Middle Ages, 185 ff. 

Hales, the case of, 406. 

Hallam, on restoration of 1660, 391 ff. 

Henry II, first dispute with Becket, 98 ; 
attitude toward powers of clergy, 
99 ff. ; Constitutions of Clarendon, 99; 
Assize of Clarendon, 102; judicial re- 

. forms, 104 ; inquest of sheriffs, 105 ; 
character of his rule, 108. 

Henry VIII, and ecclesiastical training, 
250 ff. ; motives of, in divorce con- 
troversy, 252; policy of State, 253; 
and Parliament, 255 ; as supreme head 
of the Church, 261 ; rejoices on death 
of Catherine, 273. - 

Hobson, on imperialism, 623 ff. 

Hunter, on the Indian Mutiny, 638 ff. 

Impeachment, instances of, 144; of 

Strafford, 364 ff. 
Imperialism, economic argument for, 

624; in America, 626; in Europe, 628; 

overproduction as basis of, 630; an 

alternative to, 632; social reform and, 

634- 

India, steps in rise of British dominion 
in, 443, 444; explanation of easy con- 
quest of, 444 ff. ; early European views 
of, 446 ; the British in Bengal, 447 ; the 
Black Hole of Calcutta, 447; Cliveand 
the battle of Plassev, 448 ; native 
armies of, 449; Mutiny of 1857 in, 638 
ff . ; causes of the Mutiny in, 639; 
course and results of Mutiny in, 640 ff. 

Indulgence, Declaration of, 410. 

Industry, in the Middle Ages, see Gild; 
the great revolution in, 503 ff . ; rea- 
sons for English leadership in, 507 ; 
regulative policy in, 508; character of 
changes in, 509 ff. ; the Manchester 



666 



Index 



view of, 515 ; and creation of classes, 
511-514; the textile, 516 ff. 

Inquest of sheriffs, 105. 

Ireland, Christianity in, 17; St. Patrick 
in, 18; plantations in, 425, 431; repre- 
sentation of, in Parliament, 542. 

James I, accession of, 331 ff.; character 
of. 333'. an d tlie Millenary Petition, 
335 ; at the Hampton Court Conference, 
336 ; and Parliament, 343 ; and un- 
parliamentary taxation, 345. 

James II, character of, 404; coerces 
courts, 405 ; employs Catholics, 406 ; 
declares indulgence, 410; and the 
protest of the bishops, 413 ; flight to 
France, 417. 

Kingship, origin, 10; elective, 52 ff . ; 
succession to, 54; control by Parlia- 
ment, 140 ff. ; dispensing power, 156 ; 
prerogatives of, 404. 

Knight, fee of, 75; position of, before 
the law, 80. 

Labor, effects of machinery on, 511 ; in 
politics, 608 ff. ; formation of labor 
parties, 608 ; and state interference > 
612, 615; and Chartism, 614; and 
Cobdenism, 614. 

Laisser-faire, policy of, 610; criticised, 612. 

Lappenberg, on Cnut, 38 ff. 

Laud, character of, 335 ; and ecclesiasti- 
cal discipline, 356 ; and Church archi- 
tecture, 358 ; dislike of the Puritan 
Sabbath, 359; and the Declaration of 
Sports, 362. 

Lecky, on Methodism, 478 ff. 

Lords, House of, see Parliament. 

Lutheranism, in England, 276; con- 
trasted with Calvinism, 308. 

Lyall, on British dominion in India, 
443 ff. 

Macaulay, on James II and the Whig 
revolution, 404 ff. 

McKechnie, on Magna Carta, no ff. 

Magna Carta, former views of, no; the 
term "freemen" in, 112; the enforce- 
ment of, 113; relation to the classes, 



114; as an historic landmark, 118; 
merits of, 119; exaggerations of, 120; 
value to later generations, 121. 

Mahon, Lord, on conquest of Canada, 
452 ff. 

Maitland, on the Anglo-Saxon Conquest, 
1 ff . ; on the growth of the manor, 
158 ff. 

Manor, growth of, 158 ff . ; early English, 
3, 4; thirleenth-century description of, 
158; conservatism in, 160; manage- 
ment of, 161 ff. ; accounts of, 162 ff. ; 
at the close of the 'fourteenth century, 
164 ff. ; in the fifteenth century, 166; 
summary of development of, 167. 

May, on George Ill's personal govern- 
ment, 492 ff. 

Mercia, rise under Offa, 25 ; code of laws 
for, 26 ; relations with Wessex, 26 ff. 

Methodism, origin at Oxford, 480; mis- 
sionaries of, 482 ff. ; lay preachers of, 
484 ; opposition to, 485 ; and worldly 
things, 486. 

Ministers, control of, 140; see Cabinet. 

Moghul, see India. 

Monasteries, dissolution of, 269 ff. 

Monks, Wycliffe on, 228; execution of 
the Charterhouse, 264; the passing of 
the, 297. 

More, Sir Thomas, and the Utopia, 237; 
trial and execution of, 267. 

Morley, on Cromwell, 381 ff. ; on Wal- 
pole, 466 ff. ; on Reform Bill of 1884, 
582 ff. 

Mortmain act, 214. 



Napoleon, and the Continental System, 
521 ff. 

New learning, the, 231 ff. 

Nonconformists, see Puritanism ; reli- 
gious disabilities of, 399 ff. 

Norman Conquest, formal completion 
of, 71; nature of, 73, 74; effect on 
English political development, 73 ff. 

North, Lord, government for George 
III, 496 ff. ; fall of, 502. 

Northumbria, supremacy and conver- 
sion of, 15 ; greatness of, under Ead- 
wine, 16; Irish missionaries in, 17 ff. ; 
as the diocese of York, 21. 



Index 



667 



Papacy, see Church of Rome. 

Parliament, origin of, 124 ff. ; classes 
represented in, 126 ; county representa- 
tion in, 128; borough representation, 
131 ; methods of summoning, 132 ; leg- 
islative power, 134; and taxation, 137, 
145 ; control of royal ministers, 140 ff. ; 
impeachment of ministers, 144; peti- 
tions king, 147 ; enforcement of peti- 
tions, 147 ; legislation by statute, 152 
ff.; and the breach with Rome, 255 ff. ; 
and the Elizabethan settlement, 295 ff. ; 
character of, in the seventeenth century, 
339 ff. ; contest of, with James I, 343 
ff. ; and taxation under James I, 345; 
Parliamentary crisis of 1629, 347 ff. ; 
resolutions of, in 1629, 353 ; see the 
Long Parliament ; and the restoration 
of 1660, 391 ff. ; formulates the Declar- 
ation of Right, 417 ff. ; at the opening 
of the nineteenth century, 538 ff.; con- 
ditions of representation in, 540; power 
of peers in, 541 ; representation of 
Scotland and Ireland in, 542 ; borough 
representation in, 544; bribery in con- 
nection with, 545; and the spoils of 
office, 547. 

Parliament, the Long, its position of 
control, 364; the Triennial Act and 
the impeachment of Strafford, 365 ; the 
act against dissolution, 366; additional 
constitutional restrictions, 367 ; the re- 
ligious parties in, 368 ff. ; break with 
king over the militia ordinance, 371 ; 
dissolution of, 381 ff. 

Parliamentary reform (1832), agitation 
for, 549; introduction of bill for, 549; 
debate on the bill for, 550; defeat of 
government and new election on, 551 
ff. ; defeated by House of Lords, 557; 
Macaulay's speech on, 557; the third 
bill for, 559; failure of the Lords to 
defeat, 560 ; triumph of, 564. 

Parliamentary reform (1867), Glad- 
stone's measure for, 567 ; opposition 
to, 565, 568 ; the Gladstone-Lowe de- 
bate on, 569; Disraeli's measure of, 
573 ; amendments on, 573 ; radical 
proposals for, 575 ; in the House of 
Lords, 579; passage of bill for, 581. 

Parliamentary reform (1884), Glad- 



stone's new measure for, 583 ; stoppage 
of, by House of Lords, 584 ; agitation 
through the country for, 585 ; negotia- 
tions over, between Liberals and Con- 
servatives, 587 ff. ; reintroduction of 
bill for, 591 ; compromise on, 592. 

Parties, see Parliament. 

Paul, on Reform Bill of 1867, 566 ff. 

Petition, reception of, by king, 147; 
evasion of, 146; and legislation, 148; 
and statute, 151 ; bill, substitute for, 

153- 
Pitt, Lord Chatham, and conquest of 

Canada, 456 ; and party government, 

494 ; his Parliamentary policy, 495 ; 

compared with Walpole, 468. 
Plassey, battle of, 448. 
Pollard, on Cranmer, 281 ff. 
Pollock and Maitland, on classes in the 

Middle Ages, 78 ff. 
Pope, see Church of Rome. 
Praemunire, statute of, 211. 
Praise of Folly, attack on grammarians • 

and scholasticism, 232; on scholastic 

theology, 233 ; on princes and pope, 

235- 

Protestantism, see Reformation. 

Puritanism, relation to Biblical literature, 
321; and Calvinism, 325; repression 
of, by the government, 326, 329; and 
Independency, 328 ; and the Pilgrim 
fathers, 329; James I and, 335 ff . ; 
silenced under James I, 338; and 
the Sabbath, 359; expulsion of, under 
Charles II, 402. 

Quebec, situation of, 458 ; fall of, 459 ff. 

Reformation, the new learning, 231 ff., 
246 ff. ; Wolsey as reformer, 251 ; act 
relating to annates, bulls, and episco- 
pal elections, 256; curtailment of 
papal revenues, 257 ; withdrawal from 
jurisdiction of Rome, 258 ; submission 
of the clergy, 260; royal supremacy, 
261 ; repression of Catholics, 264 ff. ; 
destruction of monasteries, 269; rela- 
tion to Lollardry, 274; influence of 
Lutheran teachings, 276; growth and 
character of Protestant literature, 
277 ff.; execution of Cranmer, 281 ff.; 



668 



Index 



the Acts of Supremacy and Uni- 
formity, 296 ff. ; Catholic arguments 
against the Elizabethan settlement, 
302 ff. ; relation of Protestantism and 
Catholicism on the Continent, 308 ff. ; 
and the Catholic reaction, 3136°.; see 
Puritanism. 

Reformation, the Counter-, 310 ff. 

Relief, 76. 

Representation, see Parliament. 

Restoration, the declaration from 
Breda, 392; punishment of the revolu- 
tionists, 342; adjustment of land 
claims, 394 ; disbandment of the army, 
398 ; establishment of Anglican pre- 
dominance, 399. 

Revolution of 1688, causes of, 404 ff. ; 
landing of William, 417; discussion of 
constitutional principles in Parliament, 
417 ; formulation of the Declaration of 
Right, 419 ; Proclamation of William 
and Mary, 421. 

Russell, Lord John, and Reform Bill of 
1832, 549 ff. 

Scholasticism, Wycliffe and, 222; Eras- 
mus on, 232 ff. 

Scotland, representation in, 542; Refor- 
mation in, 308 ff. 

Seebohm, on Erasmus and More, 231 
ff. 

Seeley, on Europe in the Elizabethan age, 
307 ff. 

Serfs, in Anglo-Saxon times, 2, 3 ; in 
Anglo-Norman period, 81 ff. ; relation 
to lord, 83 ff. ; relation to third per- 
sons, 86 ; relation to the state, 87 ff. ; 
how created, 88 ff. ; manumission of, 
91 ff. ; and Magna Carta, 116. 

Sloane, on the Continental System, 520 ff. 

Socialism, in England, definition of, 609; 
origin of, 617 ; tendencies of trades 
unions, legislation, and political pro- 
grammes towards, 618 ff. ; and local 
government, 622; and imperialism, 
634 rf. 

State interference, growth of, 615. 

Statute, development of, from petition, 

147 ff. 
Stubbs, on the Anglo-Saxon conquest, 
6 ff.; on reforms of Henry II, 96 ff. ; 



on Parliament, 124 ff., 140 ff. ; on the 
Church in the Middle Ages, 204 ff. 
Supremacy, royal, see Reformation. 

Taxation, connection with representa- 
tion, 137; and redress of grievances, 
145-147; alterations in, 396; unparlia- 
mentary, 345. 

Theodore, organization of Church in 
England, 21 ff. 

Theology, see Scholasticism. 

Towns, origin of, 169; position of, 129; 
privileges of, 130; charters of, 130; 
gilds in, 169 ff. ; life in, during Mid- 
dle Ages, 185 ff. ; municipal defence, 
185 ; police, 188 ; preservation of boun- 
daries, 188 ; land and property of, 190 ; 
improvements in, 192; charity in aid 
of, 193; amusements in, 194; church 
as centre of, 198 ; public spirit in, 201 
ff. ; and Parliament, 543 ff. 

Trent, Council of, 313 ff. 

Trevelyan, on Wycliffe, 221 ff. ; on 
James I, 331 ff. 

United States, presidential system in, 
598 ff. ; Constitution of, compared with 

• that of Australia, 650 ff. ; imperialism 
in, 626. 

Utopia, written by More, 237 ; inter- 
national policy in, 238 ; criticism of 
government, 240; social economy of, 
242 ; religion in, 242. 

Villages, early English, 3 ; see Manor. 

Walpole, Sir Robert, compared with 
eighteenth-century statesmen, 467; not 
an intriguer, 468 ; accused of Parlia- 
mentary corruption, 469; charges of 
peculation, 471 ; and civil service, 473 ; 
the evidence against him, 474; his pri- 
vate affairs, 475. 

Walpole, Sir Spencer, on the old Par- 
liamentary system, 538 ff . ; on Reform 
of 1832, 549 ff. 

Wardship, 76. 

Wesley, Charles, at Oxford, 480. 

Wesley, John, early years of, 479 ; life at 
Oxford, 480; conversion of, 482; and 
supernaturalisrn, 487; as a man, 489 ff. 



Index 



669 



Wessex, supremacy of, 25 ff. 

Whitby, Synod of, 19-21. 

Whiteneld, at Oxford, 480, 481. 

William the Conqueror, advance on 
London, 62 ff. ; negotiations with Lon- 
don, 63; accepts crown, 66; corona- 
tion, 67 ff. ; position as sovereign, 73; 
and feudalism, 75 ff. 

William III, lands in England, 417; pro- 
claimed king, 421. 

Witenagemot, right of freemen to attend, 
49; absence of law denning powers of, 
51; power in electing and deposing 



kings, 52 ff. ; share in government, 55 
ff. ; dependence on character of king, 
58; relation to Parliament, 125. 

Wolfe, General, career and character of, 
454 ff. ; his victory on the Heights of 
Abraham, 462 ff. 

Wolsey, and the Church, 251. 

Wycliffe, life of, 221 ff. ; and scholasti- 
cism, 222; development of his doc- 
trines, 223; and transubstantiation, 
225; attitude toward other sacraments, 
226 ff. ; and the pope, 229 ; and the 
Bible, 230 ; and the Reformation, 274. 



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